Everybody knows Google and Microsoft are at war. Microsoft wants to be a big player in search, and Google is making progress with their productivity-software offering. They’re both investing billions. Seems like a good match-up at first glance.

But the odds are heavily stacked in Google’s favor. The only reason Microsoft has a decent share of the search market is that IE has defaulted to msn.com for years. There’s no incentive for people to actively switch to MSN’s search engine. They’re probably 5 years behind Google in search. From what I’ve seen, they don’t have the leadership or the corporate culture to build an engine that rivals G’s. The brightest minds want to work at Google, not Microsoft.

Ask.com or some unknown startup probably has a better chance of overtaking the lead in search than MSN does. Microsoft is so desperate, they’ve created elaborate schemes to artificially inflate their search query counts, more info here.

Google, on the other hand, is giving away their Docs suite free. That’s a big incentive to switch. Even so, I doubt Docs’ growth will be explosive. Most people won’t switch from MS Office until they buy a new computer and realize they don’t really need to pay for it this time. Or when it comes time to upgrade. But a lot of them will switch, like I did recently after buying a PC. Office costs $139-$500, depending on options & add-ons. Both suites offer online collaboration. I haven’t tried Microsoft’s Office Live, but have used Google Docs’ online capabilities for the last 6 months. It’s easy to share docs/spreadsheets with friends, store them online securely, etc.

In summary, Google is going to royally kick Microsoft’s ass in this match. They’ll continue to dominate search and slowly gain market share in the productivity software market.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 9:17 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing, Google, Financial/Stock. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.