Microsoft vs Google

July 10: The world’s foremost tech titans are making increasingly aggressive forays onto each other’s turfs, and this promises to impact India and the world’s consumers in pretty substantive ways. For Google, Internet search advertising accounts for more than 90% of revenues. Microsoft’s cash cow is Windows, which brings in around 60% of the company’s revenues and runs about 90% of the world’s PCs. In the latest chapters on their battle for supremacy, Microsoft launched Bing as a live search offering while Google has announced a new operating system by the name of Chrome. Yes, that’s a name shared with Google’s one-year-old shot at taking on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer that enjoys around 70% of the browser market—a primacy that’s not a little on account of its being ready-installed as the default browser on nine out of ten PCs. The latest Google announcement came via a blog post on its corporate website. However modest that may appear to Google fans (whose numbers are legion and who consider Microsoft a dishonourable, if not evil, empire), the post’s contents were far from unassuming. VP, product management, Sundar Pichai and engineering director Linus Upson first dismissed existing operating systems as designed in an era when there was no Web. Then, they offered up the vision of an open source, lightweight operating system that would not only supply speed and simplicity, but also completely redesign the security architecture so that users would no longer have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It’s hard to think of a more spectacular undertaking. But wait, the brass tacks are even neater. Not only will the Google software be delivered over the Internet instead of in shrink-wrapped disks, it will be free!

A New Delhi-based research company had recently reported that its survey showed the number of Internet users in India dropped in January 2009, going down by 3 million over the year to 47 million. That’s a relatively ignored footnote to a well-known tale: that, compared to the cellphone revolution, the Internet has not really taken off in India. With the credit crunch having taken a toll on PC sales around the world, Indian PC shipments have kept to that trend and dropped. It’s netbooks that have been seeing a global uptick, and India conforms to that trend, too. The new Google operating system will initially be targeted at netbooks, building on their affordability-connectivity USP. Now, it won’t be easy for many existing customers—individual consumers or businesses—to switch from the Windows software with which they have grown up. That’s the comfort factor. But what India needs is to expand Internet access across new demographics. In that regard, cost becomes a more important factor than comfort. Whether free Chrome emerges dominant or Windows retains marketshare by dropping prices, there’s good news for Web penetration in India....

The Financial Express