There was Avis vs Hertz, IBM vs HP, Boeing vs Airbus, and now there’s GOOG vs MSFT.
On one hand, Microsoft has drained millions of users worldwide thanks to its name and products. These users are known, perfectly referenced, with complete coordinates, and who spend hours every day on Outlook, Word, etc…paying user licences. It’s no mistake to say that Microsoft supports an important part of world business. But it applies no monetization through advertising over this vast software user network.
On the other, Google regroups millions of web surfers through search and other services. Most of these are unknown to Google, apart from their IP and geographical localisation. Time spent on Google is much shorter than that spent on Microsoft products. The Business model is also radically different; Google’s model rests on the monetization of its internal and external advertising spaces. But no Office or OS.
Therefore, one is missing what the other doesn’t have. But in this supremacy war, Microsoft has a very big advantage: it can use its huge user database to monetize any media at any moment. For now, Google is only a data editor which uses information that it doesn’t own, like it’s search engine's results which are our URL’s, maps from other companies, press news, our emails with Gmail, etc…
Most Web 2.0 applications use Google’s business rules, such as digg and newsvine, etc… because the data that Google collects and manages is public and free of right.
This is Google’s Achilles heel, to reign on a kingdom that it doesn’t own, like a lion master of its hunting grounds, which can be upset by other predators and nature’s whims.
