They want to have it both ways: Microsoft and Google

So you’ve most probably heard last week of Google’s announcement for an operating system: Google Chrome. Of course, Microsoft has also “declared war” on Google Search, per its evolution of Windows Live to Bing. But there may also be more to this than meets the eye, as Anil Dash points out in his blog posting, Google’s Microsoft Moment, at http://dashes.com/anil/2009/07/googles-microsoft-moment.html. Is Google going the way Microsoft did – where it’s become more important to have products that run on their platforms than develop products that go where the users are? Anil mentions that Microsoft is now developing products that work on competitors’ browsers and mobile platforms. In addition to products for browsers and mobile devices, Microsoft also recently released Operations Manager 2007 R2 – which has an open-source component that monitors Unix and Linux platforms! (See http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/27600 for my earlier thoughts on the Cross-Platform Extensions.) For those who consider Microsoft to be the evil empire, Anil points out once a tech company becomes dominant in its space, anything caused by stupidity or carelessness will instead be attributed to malice. Google now has the most dominant search engine – is it on its way to becoming an evil empire itself? I suppose only time will tell. For information on the Chrome announcement: see http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/070809-google-chrome-faq.html, http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/43507, and http://dashes.com/anil/2009/07/googles-microsoft-moment.html.