Gates Vs. Google - Intensifying Competition

(Via Fortune)Microsoft now needs quantum non linear thinking to maintain the edge. From being a successful search engine, google has morphed into a software company and is emerging as a major threat to Microsoft's dominance. Google can be used with any Internet browser to search the web,desktop for just about anything; send and store up to two gigabytes of e-mail via Gmail (Hotmail, Microsoft's rival free e-mail service, offers 250 megabytes, a fraction of that); manage, edit, and send digital photographs using Google's Picasa software, easily the best PC photo software out there; and, through Google's Blogger, create, post online, and print formatted documents - all without applications from Microsoft. While Google was launching those products - all of them free- Microsoft has been trying in vain to catch up in search. It has spent about $150 million on its search project, code-named Underdog. But Google and lately Yahoo keep leaping ahead with innovations like local-area search complete with maps and satellite photos, ways to search inside a video file, and search designed for cellphones. Google has become a new kind of foe, and that's what has Gates so riled. It has combined software innovation with a brand-new Internet business model- it wounds Gates' pride that he didn't get there first. Since Google doesn't sell its search products (it makes its money from the ads that accompany its search results), Microsoft can't muscle it out of the marketplace the way it did rivals like Netscape.
Microsoft missed several emerging things - they missed travel (Expedia, Travelocity), maps and geographical information dissemination, auction (eBay and they are missing search (Google). The issue here is would this trend follow.
May be microsoft is facing the corporation Vs consumer dilemma – the role of technology companies is to make available to users what they have as against trying to push something that tech companies have developed.