The alliance against Google
Economist here has an article comparing the tussle between Google, Microsoft and Yahoo with the 19th Century Eurpoean battles between Napolean and rest of Eurpean countries.
It’s kind of funny to me as I don’t see Google as how Napolean was seen in the 19th Century – Invincible.
The articles goes on to say,
The world’s most popular web-search engine would closely resemble the Napoleonic France that in his youth humiliated Austria and Europe’s other powers. Its rivals—Yahoo!, the largest of the traditional web gateways, eBay, the biggest online auction and trading site, and Microsoft, a software empire that owns MSN, a struggling web portal—would look a lot like Russia, Prussia, and Austria.
By forging an alliance among those three top companies to create a “balance of power” against Google. Google’s enemies, he might say, ought now to do the same thing that European countries did to bring down Napaolean.
This means W-O-W. Imagine – Microsoft, Yahoo and eBay together. He heh! That would be one hell of a force to recon with. Not just money power – but between these three there are enough capable thinking heads to turn things around.
The first thing that they might wanna to turn around is this :
haribalan r said,
August 18, 2006 at 2:20 am
Good one dude.
applied imagination » Google - a rising power or a humble innovator? said,
August 21, 2006 at 6:55 am
[...] I was reading my friend’s post titled “The alliance against Google” It’s kind of weird ‘cos we’ve been close friends since high school and our aspirations are similar, but on this one topic we always seem to be on the opposite ends. Anyways I do not want to digress from what I wanted to write. I really do not see the point why the whole word (whole world in my dictionary is the software industry ) is up and against Google. Why cant people simply accept the fact that Google is growing up? Yes it is a competitor to Yahoo!, eBay, Microsoft but why doesnt the clans that worship these companies take up the competition in true spirit? [...]
vibhor said,
August 21, 2006 at 6:57 am
hi anand,
hey nice blog of urs..n ya agree with you wordpress has more feature than window live…
and ur article abt the compitition of the top most search engine and its compititors is very well intresting…
looking forward more of ur post ..
take care..
vanand said,
August 21, 2006 at 11:43 am
@arun – i work for Microsoft and Yes the passions here are high when it comes to fighting competition. I don’t see anything wrong about it though!
IMO – GMail sucks and the number of subscribers for GMail compared to Yahoo! and Hotmail proves me right. In fact, none of the Google creations were as successful as Google Search. They are trying hard by buying out many new ideas from startups and small firms, but as of now – its all about Search and nothing more.
And the “killing” part kicks in probably because of the “Do not evil” motto of Google :)
vanand said,
August 21, 2006 at 12:23 pm
Now, what can I say about this :)
Google execs are in a selling spree giving up about 23million shares in total on Aug 9th. Not only this it is remarkable that not a single Google insider has bought a single share of the company in the 18 months
Reported here
Vijay said,
August 22, 2006 at 12:28 am
The search industry, despite its revenue and stature today, is still in its infancy. While google does have a good headstart, others do have enough resources to play the game and be in it for the long run. Maybe, rather than the consolidation we see in the chart today, there will be a lot of fragmentation in future in favour of niche search services which would cater to demands of specific sections of the netizenry. Blog on!
vanand said,
August 22, 2006 at 12:52 pm
Google’s market cap is $80 billion. The last fraud suit against Google was settled by paying off $90 million.
Now, let’s wake up – its not a new-kid-on-the-block-anymore. Neither Google nor search is in “infancy” or anything close to soemthing like that.
The war is ON and Google is up to it.
It’s all good for Microsoft and Yahoo in a way, cos they have been shown by Google as to how much money they can make out of search – they have learnt their lessons and getting more and more serious everyday. In fact, Microsoft has always been a company that’s taken competition head-on and fight it hard. It was the OpenSource threat that made them make Windows Server better and now it’s giving a hard competition fighting the enterprise server market with Sun, IBM and Red Hat.
Arun said,
August 22, 2006 at 5:59 pm
see my reply!
http://momentlogs.com/arun/2006/08/21/google-a-rising-power-or-a-humble-innovator/#3
vanand said,
August 22, 2006 at 6:54 pm
Believe me! I’ve seen that list before and spent timeless discussions with others within and outside MSFT about how good/bad/credible is that list.
Yes, GMail and Mac OS X are on top of that list- but who uses them :)
And yes, IMO-Gmail still sucks – it might use AJAX effectively and Microsoft may try and use it as an example for illustrating AJAX usage – but to me, it still sucks.
Superman said,
August 23, 2006 at 10:59 pm
Napoleon Bonaparte (Bone apart?) cannot be compared with any one – Churchill, Roosevelt, Subash Bose or Samurai and more, historical heroes. History would suggest that Napaoleon belonged to a league of his own.
Napoleon would sleep in the midst of a battle for a few minutes (Well it’s not sleep – but deep meditation). This makes the body and mind fresh to be ready for fresh attacks or plan and destroy enemy by a new, cunning and effective method.
But present day CEO’s have valour, bravery and brain for what? Become big in terms of money power? They need not have the best swords, cannons, horses, arrows and infantry. They only need a pool of outsourced clever people from other countries and bargaining brainpower to be in the market or throw others out of the market. No muscle power. Only crude intelligence and political amendments.
So back to the topic – this battle is new one. This Google vs XYZ is a unique one.
Windows are good. Sure other doors will be shut ?