The Tech Industry Bigwigs Gearing For A Spend Competition

Microsoft seems to have recognized they have to invest heavily in infrastructure and compete aggressively or risk losing to Google & other providers of software as a service. David Kirkpatrick captures the changing nature of the software industry- consumer software is increasingly taking the form of Internet services and software is becoming a capital-intensive business. Microsoft intends to spend staggering amount of money in building data cents to buy, build and manage the data centers that are the heart of the Internet economy. Long term, one can envision a world where most of the planet's 6 billion people are online most of the time. And we will all likely be communicating and being entertained with bandwidth-intensive video. Not for nothing we are beginning to see shriller views getting exchanged between Microsoft & Google. The beleaguered Microsoft is investing in being part of such a future where Google is clearly in already. Clearly, the changes Microsoft has to make to compete with Google are neither easy nor certain to succeed. I liked the views shared by Cisco’s Dan Scheinman speaking on the changes being attempted at Microsoft, - " You've moved from the tyranny of the application to this massive scale of infrastructure - this is a disruptive change in the computer industry. "Microsoft has to be willing to throw out everything they've done and change religion from Catholic to Protestant” .
In this rapidly changing world, it is definitely clear that while infrastructure alone will not be enough to give any one of the giant Internet companies advantages over another, while in this arms race, the rest of the crowd may end up left behind as the giants battle for supremacy in the race for Internet infrastructure. The storage market is indeed creating huge impact all around – The iPod economy, gmail & amazon’s storage services are all trailblazing initiatives created on the back of the advancing storage technology coupled with falling storage size and price. This opens up interesting possibilities as well – Sun can begin to dress up to get acquired by Google – after all it already uses Sun’s technology.

Update : These developments open up possibilities for the folks at Sun as Sramana Mitra sees it to create an enterprise strategy if Sun's massive tech infrastructure capabilities and Google's massive online presence can come together.