Google Simply Rocks!

And My View on What Microsoft Should do!

Google Does It Again!

Google is a perfect combination of technical competency of the decade and the marketing machine - atleast for now. Combining this with their Outside-In approach has made them the "talk of the town". It has used these capabilities once again at Consumer Electronics Show (CES) for the launch of its video service

Yahoo News has a pretty good story about their launch:

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060107/gadget_show_google_video.html?.v=3

http://yahoo.reuters.com/financeQuoteCompanyNewsArticle.jhtml?duid=mtfh05774_2006-01-07_05-32-42_n06140985_newsml

Cringley Column predicts the direction where it might be leading (which is kewl):

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060105.html

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051117.html

Every news that is reported is filled with Google vs Microsoft. To me, its funny - newspapers are just trying to increase their circulation, eyeballs etc - selling what would sell!

My View on What Microsoft Should do:

M$ needs to decide what markets it want to play in irrespective of the competition. Their strength continues to be their dominance position in Operating System and Office tools

So they need to ensure that they win the following segments (which they already play-in with different degrees):

• Desktop (enterprise and consumer segments)
• Servers
• Mobile handsets
• Consumer Electronics

They need to pull in all the hardware vendors together - which is so much opposite to M$ today. But if they can do that, they can execute on the vision of Convergence - with M$ dominating on all these different device types!

If M$ wants to have a big presence in the media market, they have to have a focused leadership team with a planned strategy and an execution plan. And then let the battle begin! They would win if they are organized

If M$ wants to have a huge presence in online services - like email, blogging, photo sharing, video - they need to understand where the market is going, what the key players are etc. They need to put down the pros and cons of having a [cloned] online services portal, of investing in one of the other leading-edge services portal or of licensing the softwares to the application hosting sites or these portals

They can come up with a "Microsoft Online Portal Office" which can be licensed to many portals. Under this suite of new office tools, they can then innovate and do acquisitions to grab new ideas (say a new service comes)

What may also make sense is the implementation of the theme Convergence on the web - a relaunch of passport in some other manner! This theme can be combined with the Microsoft Online Portal Office and voila, they can lead that market segment

On the security front, they can turn the tables around. Make everyone responsible for it - it is a collaboration and a shared responsibility of the virus protection guys, the firewall guys, the networking guys et all. They need to realize that security market with all the players is something that can not go away, so let these other players take a part of the blame when these players take part of the pie!

Conclusion

I am not sure whats up at M$ and/or what Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates are planning. But their marketing strategy is broken and they need to show a vision to the world!