The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Google was started by two guys in their dorm room at Stanford. They had been frustrated by search engines that up until their time were very hard to get good results out of. Placing the word ÒtigersÓ into a search engine would have gained results that ranged from the Hamilton Tiger-Cats to Siberian tigers to the trouble with poaching tigers in Africa. It was up to the user to spend a lot of time learning to create complex search strings and then sort out the results. Google changed this by doing all of the complex math behind the scenes. Writing and constantly tweaking the formulas behind the scenes has allowed Google to grow into a company producing billions of dollars each year in profit. Google was David and Microsoft was Goliath. But no more. Last week Microsoft offered over $44 billion to purchase Yahoo. One of the original web search engines and information portals, Yahoo is still an online powerhouse because of other businesses it owns such as the social bookmarking site del.icio.us, which lets you share your bookmarks with other people. Yahoo also owns Flickr, the worldÕs largest photo-sharing site. ItÕs easy to see that Microsoft is worried. They were into the personal computer industry very early, basically inventing a lot of what we now know about computers. But the Internet has changed things. As more people have broadband internet service and services such as Google docs have emerged, MicrosoftÕs products have fumbled and their revenue has fallen. Their latest operating system, Vista, has not been selling well and much of their money has come from other sources, such as the Xbox 360 gaming system. While still dominant, huge, and difficult to move, Microsoft has taken a lot of bad press over the last few years as their products have fallen victim to viruses and are then in need of a constant string of patches to stay updated. Google, in the meantime, has gone public, gained billions of dollars in online advertising, and expanded into almost every online sector imaginable. Google is growing so fast that they are building dozens of new data centres around the world in places where electricity will be abundant in years to come, as they are concerned about a constant supply 50 years from now. Google used to claim that it was the Òanti-Microsoft.Ó They portrayed themselves as a smaller, more responsive company. Their slogan was to Òdo no harm.Ó They were the good guys. But they canÕt hide behind this idea of being the small company anymore. Microsoft has tried to make the web and social software a priority. Their Zune music player, for example, allows people to share their music wirelessly with other people who are around. They have tried to build collaboration into Office applications and move towards allowing people to use their software how they need to. They have wanted to become more responsive to customer needs and move seamlessly into a changing world. But they have had a difficult time. They often appear to be a large bumbling company that is suffering through tough times. Microsoft hopes that purchasing a major online powerhouse such as Yahoo will change all that. They are betting that their fortunes can be revived and their company turned around by having access to YahooÕs services. What would their software look like if it moved online? What if they embraced the web with all of its open standards and open ideas? Could they even do that? Microsoft doesnÕt have much time to close this deal, but the repercussions of it going through will last for years to come. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
