Google Vs Microsoft: “If you cannot grow by your own, then challenge your competitor in what he does best”

That’s what seems to be at the top of the mind of the major strategists at both these technology behemoths.
Whats Google doing to get into Microsofts Domain:
Lets quickly get into the meat of this story, that late on Tuesday evening Google announces through its blog post that they would be developing a new Chrome Based Operating system that is lightweight , linux based and freely available on the web so that the open source developers could develop customize applications for it like for any other linux based operating systems. Whats more this would be available for free in the second half of next year. Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS,” the blog post said. “We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the Web in a few seconds.” Now if you see the point about getting into the web quickly you ll know what Google has in mind. This is where they want to challenge Microsoft in what has been their forte. Microsoft has already made announcements of launching its latest operating system Windows 7 a successor to the not so successful predecessor the Windows Vista OS, on the 22 nd of Octobet,2009 and is all set to unveil the 2010 Windows Office version on July 13,2009 that would be available next year. Over the last few decades Microsoft has been extremely successful in the OS Business by having 95 percent of world PC’s using the Windows OS and the Microsoft Office Suite that comprises of excel, power-point and word. This was offered as software that is deployed on every PC. However Google launched its edition of Google Apps and is promoting it effectively where applications like Google Spreadsheets hosted in their own data centres through which multiple users could make changes at once. It has floated ideas of creating such applications which would be competitors of Microsofts excel, powerpoint & word and would be offered over the web which in other words could be an example of “Software As a service”. Google primarily makes its revenues through web based advertising and it made sense for them to offer such services over the web so as to use its online advertising very effectively. More that you and me use the web for all our work, more money will Google make through various ways.For example While using Gmail if you have an email from your friend about best places to visit in Paris on the right hand side of your inbox you ll have advertisements about cheap flights and hotels in Paris. To be honest I get scared about gmail as Google reads each and every email of mine and then posts advertising related to the topic of the email. Microsoft for its own benefits has realized the power of the web . Microsoft in November began offering Exchange and SharePoint as a Web service for a monthly fee. For customers tired of maintaining these unwieldy programs on their own servers, the change is welcome: They usually end up paying less to subscribe to the software than they spent buying the program and paying for the staff and hardware to run it. Microsoft may also be toying with the idea of offering its Office Suite and its applications over the web partly if not completely. Infact Microsoft will offer a free version of Office with limited functionality to customers who don't want to pay up for the whole shebang. Among other things, the free version, which will be supported in part by online advertising, will let users access any Word or Excel document remotely, via cell phone or a Web site. The latest move by Google to create an Operating system that boots up at the click of the button and allows users to access web based applications like Facebook and browse the web through the Chrome Browser is aimed at getting more and more users online thus generating more revenues through online advertising. This could provide a welcome change where an old PC takes about10-12 minutes to boot up and all applications being launched one by one. Another major driver behind this move has been the proliferation of netbooks. Rather than buying bulky desktop computers, consumers have been turning recently toward small, low-cost laptops known as netbooks, which serve as little more than gateways to the Web. Google says its operating system will be initially aimed at netbooks, which are generally not powerful enough to handle the latest version of Windows. But Microsoft has been quick to react by launching Windows 7 which is also scalable for Netbooks and lower end laptops. How successful will Google be in proliferating its Chrome OS versus the world renowned and almost generic for an OS Windows would be for time to tell. Firstly, Google has little background in marketing and customer support, factors that could prove critical to the success of a new operating system. Microsoft foots the marketing bill for Windows, running multimillion-dollar campaigns across many forms of media with most new releases. Its recent "Laptop Hunter" TV ads are part of a $300 million campaign launched last year. By contrast, Google's promotions for new products typically take the form of a single blog post. Microsoft's biggest advantages may come in the area of distribution. While Google has no real experience, sales staff, or distributor network to reach out to millions of would-be customers, Microsoft has 3,500 sales reps. More important, about 650,000 companies around the world make some or all of their living reselling Windows and Windows-based applications.

What Microsoft is doing to get into Googles Domain:
In early 2007 Microsoft tried to acquire Yahoo by offering almost $ 50 billion ,but this were rubbished as rumours. Eight months later Microsoft has made an official proposal to acquire Yahoo in a deal worth $44.6 billion in cash and stock, at a price of $31 per share, which represents a 62 percent premium for shareholders. The only rationale behind this move and still continues on the back of the mind of microsofts top officials has been the Search Engine Market share. Here you have a solid case where Microsoft has been trying catch up with the near 70 percent search engine share of Google by acquiring Yahoo thus resulting in a combined market share of close to 27 percent. Over the past few years the dominance of Google in the search engine share space and diversification into other web based applications such as Gmail, Google apps has hit Microsofts by reducing the share of its msn portal and also the once pioneering Hotmail email service. Apart from catching up with Google, Microsoft saw great potential in Online advertising revenues. In announcing its buyout offer, Microsoft spent a lot of time talking about the potential growth of the online advertising market, and at the company's annual investor meeting in July, CEO Ballmer also hammered home the online ad opportunity. With a cloud over the acquisition of Yahoo Microsoft decided to launch Bing a new search engine based on Intelligent Decision Making. Bing, launched on June 3 but available to some users a few days earlier, took 8.23 per cent of US Web searches in June, up from 7.81 per cent for Microsoft search just prior to its rollout and 7.21 per cent in April, said Internet data firm StatCounter. Google lost share slightly, dipping to 78.48 per cent from 78.72 per cent before Bing. Yahoo Inc, the perennial No 2 in the market, rose to 11.04 per cent from 10.99 per cent. Bing's share peaked in the first week of June at 9.21 per cent, falling away in the middle two weeks before coming back at 8.45 per cent in the last week of June. The results may give heart to Microsoft, which is investing heavily in its loss-making online services business and is refusing to cede the market to Google. Two Bing features jump out right away: the search history listing and the related searches suggestion in the left column. Search history would certainly come in handy when you're trying term after term and don't want to repeat yourself, and the related searches are indeed helpful when it comes to narrowing your search down from broad to specific terms. That is in line with the "intelligent search/decision engine" angle Another aspect where Bing has proved beneficial is offering important tweets from Twitter the popular micro-blogging site through its search system.Google has been rumored to be casting an eye toward creating a tool for searching social networking sites, like Twitter. But today, Bing came out and did it. When someone does a search on Bing for Al Gore in association with Twitter, for instance, the user should see Gore's latest tweets come up among the search results.If online chatter succeeds, Bing won't be alone for long in offering this Twitter-search feature. A possible Google microblogging search service that would focus on finding Twitter posts has been the subject of online chatter in recent weeks.

My Conclusion:
Well that’s all I have to say about Microsoft getting into Googles domain with Bing and about Google trying to get one up on Microsoft with Chrome OS. At the end of the day if you ask me I see both making truckloads of money for themselves as both the OS market and search engine market will only grow with computer literacy growing across the world whatever be their market share. The fact is they both are technology behemoths well established into what they have doing and if anything would be generating higher revenues and having more diversified product lines.