Gates Plans Leave Amid Great Change
Since this man basically built my house, I’m still interested in hearing what he has to say about technology. He’s stepping down from a day-to-day role at Microsoft next year and this article discusses it: Microsoft’s Gates Plans Leave Amid Great Change - New York Times
In light of the success of the iPod, Treo, Blackberry and (apparently) the iPhone, this quote about Google is interesting:
“How many products, of all the Google products that have been introduced, how many of them are profit-making products?” he asked. “They’ve introduced about 30 different products; they have one profit-making product. So, you’re now making a prediction without ever seeing the software that they’re going to have the world’s best phone and it’s going to be free?”
Again, the ability to create compelling software will determine the winners. “The phone is becoming way more software intensive,” he said. “And to be able to say that there’s some challenge for us in the phone market when its becoming software intensive, I don’t see that.”
As I mentioned earlier, Microsoft is going after the heart of Google’s revenue generation: advertising. Google has attempted new products (which Gates is alluding to) which would eat into Microsoft’s revenue. As far as I can tell, Google has not been that successful… yet. They’ve been replicating other companies’ products, like MS Office, Mapquest, etc. While they’ve made improvements to the technology in some cases, they still have not created the killer app that will take down Microsoft.
I think it is going to be easier for Microsoft to damage Google than the other way around. Coupled with some of the political / image missteps out of Google that seems to have taken some of the steam out of them - I’m thinking about privacy, China, etc. - the battle seems to be favoring Microsoft right now. We’ll see though…
