Alex Gomes >> Blog

Google screams anti-trust.

Marisa Mayer from Google hit headlines recently for the comment:

“The market favors open choice for search, and companies should compete for users based on the quality of their search services,” Marissa Mayer, the vice president for search products at Google, told the Times. “We don’t think it’s right for Microsoft to just set the default to MSN. We believe users should choose.”

What it means is that, Google is pursuing ant-trust action again Microsoft for MSN Search being default in IE 7+.

Well this was expected sooner later based on the track record of Microsoft.

The interesting part was however completely different.

First, Google pursuing anti-trust so soon, even before Microsoft officially launching IE 7+. This shows the mental preparedness on part of Google and willingness to fight the hard and dirty way.

Secondly, Microsoft getting the support from the webmasters and tech community instead of Google. And that’s putting it mildly. I would go even further and say webmasters were outright hostile against Google. Something unthinkable in the late 90’s. The tide has turned. Google has lot of work to do in improving relationship with webmasters.

A new search war has started. It’s a war between Google and Microsoft. And in between is every webmaster and web publisher. If one does not defeat the other, then they are going to be history. Its win or die for both companies.

Google is a competitive company which Microsoft has never seen before. IBM, Novell, Sun, Oracle, etc is nothing even close to Google. Google is agile, competitive and growing at an alarming rate. Microsoft has never lost the war. But this is different. Google is tough and won’t throw the towel easily like Netscape. The money involved runs into billions and best ROI in the industry. Money that Microsoft has enough off and can even have loss leader to win. Its going to be interesting how this war is waged. The winner will define IT in decades to come.