I suspect that the folks at Microsoft are laughing their asses off right now. My money is on Microsoft launching a new search service by the end of the year that will blow up Google.
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Not quite.
The folks in Redmond, Wash. are smart, aggressive and sit upon a K2 of cash.
Even so, this doesn't mean they are invulnerable to the effects of a competitive new technology -- which is really what Google represents.
Although Microsoft appears to own the entire IT world, there are many areas where they're quite weak -- such as high-performance computing and, more to the point as regards Google, scalable distributed applications (see link listed below for how this relates to Google).
Most of the business press either ignores this fact or isn't aware of it but Gates and co. are very much concerned about the long-term implications of Microsoft's failure, to date, to create a truly outstanding platform that can form a part of the backbone of the Internet the way Google's algorithm has.
They're also concerned about profitability and the fact that their ubiquitousness means their primary competitors are previous versions of their own operating systems and applications. They face an updated version of the classic monopolist's dilemma. So I wouldn't be so sure about Microsoft laughing and crushing -- they're quite paranoid (an unusual trait for so large a firm) and are scrambling to develop a response that will be technically equal to Google's achievement. Not a small task, even with tens of billions of dollars at your beck and call.
A theory of Google's distributed
<http://blog.topix.net/archives/000016.html >
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