Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie yesterday described the company's most recent Internet-based competitor, Google, as a "wake-up call."

Despite Ozzie's internal efforts, Microsoft has only floundered in the online space since Google's rise. Part of the reason is corporate inertia: Microsoft's biggest businesses, Windows, Office, and Windows Server, are traditional software products with entrenched teams of backers who have only slowly realized the dangers of Web-based software services. Microsoft fears that it will have to cannibalize its most successful products in order to effectively compete with companies such as Google.

One thing is pretty clear: A decade ago, Microsoft was willing to do whatever it took to take down Netscape, including the ill-advised bundling of its Web browser into Windows, despite internal protestations about the technical and moral problems with such an approach. Stung by the innumerable antitrust battles that followed, today's Microsoft seems unwilling to change as dramatically. And its current complementary approach, from what I can see, has failed. Put simply, Microsoft may indeed have gotten a wake-up call, but it's been punching the Snooze button ever since.

Labels: Google, Internet, Microsoft