Google and Microsoft
: Says David Galbraith: “Google owns the command line to the Internet and Microsoft cannot afford to concede that to them.”
1 response to “Google and Microsoft”
-
What amazes me about Google’s rise is the sheer myopia demonstrated by the owners of the Internet’s three other leading portal/gateway sites. It was already clear by the summer of 2000 that Google was in a league of its own as far as search engines go, and either Microsoft, AOL, or Yahoo! could’ve bought the company for a small fraction of what they’d have to pay today. But each of them completely dropped the ball. They’ll all be paying for that short-sightedness for years to come.
On a similar vein, Microsoft could’ve snatched AOL and Yahoo! for chump change around 1996, but Gates & co. arrogantly thought that they could run these companies into the ground the way they would with Netscape. These kinds of things are worth keeping in mind when castigating IBM, HP, Xerox, etc. for bungling the PC boom. No one would dare call Microsoft a company lacking quality leadership, but even they managed to repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot during the Internet boom.
