Google Set To Create A New Desktop & Internet World

Rajesh points to a guest post in Om Malik's Blogsite by Robert Young wherein Bob highlights that the internet has a deflationary effect on every industry it touches, whether it be financial services, travel, printing & publishing, media & entertainment, or telephony. Google’s strategic plan it seems is to obviously leverage deflation to its own advantage. He adds, "Google’s recent moves show that they are using “free” to gradually devalue of Microsoft’s assets, and thus its market cap. This is part of a mutation of the OS into a whole new animal. Google with their desire to build a comprehensive “platform will make Microsoft’s entire strategic plan and mission, which revolves around the continued proliferation and dominance of the desktop PC operating system, obsolete by making Google itself the (virtual)operating system". In the future, all computing devices, whether it be the PC, mobile phone, TV, etc., will simply be terminals that “plug-in” to Google’s massive server grid and application services. With the increasing price/performance of CPUs, memory, bandwidth, and storage, Google’s strategic edge will be based on their advantageous cost of processing bits. Free services, supported by advertsing become the new model (user should be comfortable sharing data & behavious though). In future google shall provide solutions for meeting all computing needs & Bob writes tantalisingly that hardware devices shall be bought based on such criteria. This way, Google is using the internet to systematically devalue Microsoft’s assets, forcing a “Microsoft’s Black Monday” on the wall street in future. David card adds Google is leveraging themantra that built Microsoft: who controls the UI controls the user; who controls the API controls the programmer. Great businesses are made of this.

True as with a slew of recent product launches, Google has made software developers as key stakeholdersin the success of its initiatives. Google is supporting standards and providing hooks intended to let outside developers create add-on products. Just as Microsoft’s developer driven -"ecosystem" of applications running on Windows and Office, its desktop application suite, helped microsoft immensly, Google is now trying to re-create a similar ecosystem on the Web. The News.com article rightly points out that almost all Google's services are accessible via APIs, which give software developers the documentation needed to build add-on products. Google's latest services underscore the company's efforts to create a platform on which to build add-on products and services. While Google's products are not a replacement OS, but the collection of tools released thus far serve the same purpose. Even products that run on Windows PCs, such as Google's Picasa photo-editing software, could tie back to Google's online services. Google is intelligently rebatching Microsoft desktop products/services as its. In perpetuating the Web as development platform, Salesforce integrated its CRM services with Google Maps and is toying with a few other Google services, including AdSense and Sidebar. Adam Gross of salesforce.com highlights that companies, such as eBay, Yahoo and Amazon.com, treat their Web sites as customizable platforms, & offers a starkly different technology vision to developers than traditional software companies do.It is slowly leading to a situation where one model says build for Windows and the Microsoft 'stack'; the other says build for the Internet. The platform of the future shall not be focussed on controlling the hardware but it is going to be around access, community, collaboration & content. Amazing vision - getting executed very well in very high stakes game - clearly the rules of the game are changing.