John Gruber over at Daring Fireball explains why the recent barrage of articles about Google vs Microsoft battles do not make much sense. Very simply, Microsoft is a software company while Google is an advertising company. Google might create software but their profits come from advertising, the software is to further aid that process. Now this does not mean in the future that Google could not become a software company but as of right now their competitors outside of search engine companies are newspapers and print publications. It makes me wonder if you classify Google as an advertising company, then you could easily see that they are the biggest and baddest online or offline advertising company. And maybe some of the excitement over Google vs Microsoft will die down because Google vs (nameless small-town paper) is 1) not very exciting and 2) Google then becomes the big, mean, bad corporation -- an image that I think Googlers are not yet ready to embrace.The Advertising Platform
John Gruber over at Daring Fireball explains why the recent barrage of articles about Google vs Microsoft battles do not make much sense. Very simply, Microsoft is a software company while Google is an advertising company. Google might create software but their profits come from advertising, the software is to further aid that process. Now this does not mean in the future that Google could not become a software company but as of right now their competitors outside of search engine companies are newspapers and print publications. It makes me wonder if you classify Google as an advertising company, then you could easily see that they are the biggest and baddest online or offline advertising company. And maybe some of the excitement over Google vs Microsoft will die down because Google vs (nameless small-town paper) is 1) not very exciting and 2) Google then becomes the big, mean, bad corporation -- an image that I think Googlers are not yet ready to embrace.
1. I don't think, the current discussion is about Google vs Microsoft competing on the same platform (software). I also agree, that Google doesn't have a platform (yet).
I think this is about influence. And power. Microsoft was and is gaining influence on software. Products that let you manage/store information. They built a platform, which has reached every desktop PC near you.
Google is gaining influence on leveraging that information. Building a yet to be defined platform. And yes, they finance their endeavours by advertising. But ultimately, it's about information, their mission statement says that. And, from leveraging information via control to power it's a short distance. Once they have achieved that, they have a "platform". It's disconnected from software, hardware or anything else we define as a platform these days.
It's about information and control. And it will make all other platforms obsolete, because access to and leveraging of, information is not defined by operating systems like Windows any longer, but by, well, whatever Google will call it...
Posted at 5:51PM on Aug 30th 2005 by The Cod