Is Google the New Microsoft?

ericjones12398 writes "Google's come up with its solution for Dropbox: If you can't buy 'em, copy 'em. The search engine and online advertising giant replaced its popular Google Docs service with Google Drive, a cloud computing storage service designed to directly compete with start up Dropbox. This raises the question, has Google become the new Microsoft? Us ancient folk who remember the 1990s and the Microsoft anti-trust trial can certainly notice some parallels. A big, dare we say monolithic, company doesn't bother innovating on its own. It just waits for other companies to innovate, makes some changes for legally significant distinctions and enters into competition with the innovator. Sound familiar?

Comments

Re:Singing the Blues

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when Microsoft was the refreshing, freedom-loving alternative to Big Blue.

Yes, that was from 1975 all the way until 1976.

Microsoft Business Disaster Model

[slasho81]

Shamelessly stolen from four years ago:

Google now has a full-blown case of the Microsoft Business Disaster Model. This model goes like this:

• Get a highly profitable monopoly.
• Watch gigantic sums of cash accumulate.
• Panic at the thought of actually distributing that cash to shareholders, as the law requires.
• Start throwing money at any additional product line you can think of, believing that because you got that first profitable monopoly (largely by luck), you are Really Smart, and therefore you can make money at anything.
• Watch with relief as stockholders don't notice how much of their money you are shoveling into the fire, because your core monopoly is still making huge profits.
• Spend years telling yourself that having divisions that lose gigantic sums of money for years means you are now a "long term" strategist.
• Drift slowly into decay like the Soviet Union, still powerful, still important, but internally depressing, wasteful, and decrepit.

The most profitable company this year (2008) was Exxon-Mobil. A company that has to get its hands dirty and actually move a physical product had higher profits than Microsoft, a company that just thinks up bits that it then distributes, largely electronically. Imagine the profits if Microsoft were to sell off all its huge money losers, retain only enough employees to maintain Windows and Office, and pay out all the profits as dividends. It would be the most incredible stock the market had ever seen.

Re:Let's just say

[Anonymous Coward]

GMail came out with 1GB storage at time when Hotmail and Yahoo offered 5-10 MB. In reaction everyone and their cousins started offering larger storage.

GMail had interesting presentation of mail over the web. Their interface was _way_ more responsive than competition at that time. They were the first to offer keyboard navigation. So if you have a habit of sticking with the keyboard, their interface was very efficient to use.

They were the first vendors to offer a threaded-view of mails on the web (I said on the web, not comparing to native clients). Perhaps they still are the only ones, I am not sure. Labels is a useful idea as it allows you to classify the same conversation under multiple heads. They came up with the idea of searching emails instead of sorting them for easy retrieval later.

I say thing were pretty innovative with GMail. Not sure how else you mean by innovation. One can argue about more prominent examples of innovation on the history of mankind, but GMail was innovation too.

Re:Since Google wasn't the first search engine

[loneDreamer]

Not to mention many other innovative papers studied in academia. Sure, "the little box were you type a query" doesn't seem special, but you are discounting Map-Reduce (from which Hadoop was copied), Google File System (HFS copies it), PageRank, the push to use redundancy on of-the-shelf cheap disks and other components, etc etc etc

A bunch of their techniques are never seen by the end user, but they have GREAT innovations on the back end.