Sunday, August 28, 2005

Sabeer Bhatia, billionaire co-founder of Hotmail, thinks Google is smarter, quicker and hungrier than Microsoft, the company that in 1997 paid him and his partner Jack Smith $US400 million for the email invention that today has 50 million users worldwide.

But Hotmail and Microsoft are now under severe challenge, Mr Bhatia said.

"Microsoft isn't going away any time soon, but the role they will play in the future of software will not be the same as it has been in the past two decades," Mr Bhatia said. "Because Microsoft is so big and slower to move than companies such as Google and Yahoo, their dominance will be less.

"Google is playing a brilliant game and expanding its activities. They have a fantastic revenue stream. They are leveraging their core strength, their enormous distribution, to successfully enter other areas."

The really great ideas in technology do not often come from big companies, he added. World-shifting innovation more often came from the classic Silicon Valley start-up - "a handful of guys in a garage."

It was a mark of Google's genius, and a key to its success, that it encouraged its engineers to spend "20 per cent of their time, one day a week, thinking outside the box, on any idea that interests them", he said. "As a result, they are keeping future, would-be entrepreneurs in-house and innovating within Google."