RSSGoogle: Microsoft remains a strong competitor, even without Yahoo
By Jacqueline Emigh | Published May 9, 2008, 6:19 PM
Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday that he still sees Microsoft as a potent competitor, even though its concerted and often acrimonious campaign to buy Yahoo now looks like it will pass into history.
"Microsoft has been a significant competitor with Google for a very long time," Schmidt declared, in a talk with reporters just before Google's annual meeting in the Silicon Valley.
"Microsoft is a very large competitor across all facets of Google for many reasons. Applications. Search. Advertising. Display. Microsoft is well funded, clever [and] smart -- and they have a lot of advantages nobody else has," said Schmidt, according to a "live blog" transcript from the press Q&A in California, posted by Rob Hof of BusinessWeek.
Schmidt told journalists Google was as surprised as anyone that Microsoft reacted to Yahoo's repeated rebuffs by just walking away. "Everybody was surprised," said the Google CEO.
He then admitted he was pleased about the outcome of Microsoft's bid, saying, "Obviously we're very happy it didn't happen."
"It would be bad for the Internet," he later predicted, citing a blog post on the Google site about the "extreme market share in some areas" that would be created through a Microsoft buyout of Yahoo. Schmidt also said Google can never be certain that the prospect of Microsoft/Yahoo merger won't happen, at some point. "You never say never in this business," he noted.
The CEO also stopped short of agreeing with one questioner that Google emerged "the big winner" out of the failure of Microsoft's attempt. "This is not about winning, at least in the short term," he replied. "It's a good lesson for businesses that it's very easy to go off the rails if you get distracted."
While Microsoft has lots of clever and smart people working for it, as a whole it is stupid and slow, and has only succeeded by sheer dint of being able to throw 10 or even 11 figures and thousands of people at any problem it wants to solve and simply succeeding by the brute force afforded by the fact that it is richer than most countries in the world, and can take years and expenditures that would bankrupt almost any other company to finally blunder into some level of success.
No one Microsoft product is the best of its kind these days. That might have been true in the past, but right now they are coasting on momentum and their ill-gotten monopoly. Microsoft's decline will accelerate unless the company can radically alter its horrendous management processes. Microsoft has enough talent in its ranks to truly be the world's leader in software technology, but as with any large organization, upper management will delay, dilute or completely destroy any real innovations, either intentionally, or more likely unintentionally. After all, they've invested most of the company's resources in avoiding having to compete fairly, rather than actually competing, and have seemingly reached a point where it can no longer compete on a level playing field (if it ever could).
But Microsoft is still huge, still rich, and still has a 90+ percent market share in most areas. They aren't going away for a long time, but if recent history is a trend that doesn't change, their decline will be long and painful, and their customers and competitors will bear much of the pain, as they do today.
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hmmm....interesting.
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That was very entertaining.
Thank you.
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Be nice!
At least the XP service pack3 'kills' AMD processors, thus providing a reprieve for those folks from having to experience the "long and painful" decline! LOL!
http://www.tomshardware....indows-XP-SP3,5334.html
It's not much, but its something!
And they say MS can't accomplish or do anything right!!
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Umm...you read that article, right? That's an HP problem--they're the ones who go by the "put everything on it so any situation will work" philosophy, so it makes since that they will have every incompatability humanly possible on their machines.
It is stupid for them to use those files on Intel and AMD machines, and is not standard practice at all. It is only a matter of time before they have more major problems as a result of installing Intel, NVIDIA, and ATI drivers all on the same box as well.
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Couldn't agree more
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