Ballmer urges troops to slap down Apple and Google

Stephen Withers
Friday, 25 July 2008 11:21

Opinion and Analysis

So when Ballmer says "We'll introduce new approaches that move beyond a white page with 10 blue links to provide customers with a customized view of their world", I really hope he doesn't have a bloated Silverlight page in mind. Search is a waypoint, not a destination.

But if Microsoft does get it right, search traffic could move very quickly in its favour. A single pair of data points doesn't make a strong argument, but I just tried entering the same search terms (a number of words relevant to this article) into Google and Live Search, and the latter took twice as long. Both returned the same, highly relevant page as the first result, and the Live results page was about 10 percent 'lighter' than Google's.

Make no mistake, Microsoft has its eyes on the "rivers of gold" that have flowed out of newspaper classified advertising and into search advertising.

Ballmer also promises that Microsoft "will out-innovate Google in key areas - we're already seeing this in our maps and news search." How well is the company doing? Please post a comment to our forum saying whether you use Google's or Microsoft's maps and news services.

What about applications? Ballmer claims Microsoft leads Google in the enterprise. It's hard to argue with that. But it's still very early days in the shift from the PC-centric model epitomised by Microsoft Office to the cloud-based world demonstrated by Google Docs and the like.

While the corporate world hasn't been quick to embrace Google Docs, it does seem to be gaining traction in the smaller end of the market. Much the same can be said for open source applications such as OpenOffice.org. But I suspect that the 'pay for the server and get the client free' proposition presented by IBM and Zimbra could gain increasing attention if the downturn in the share and property markets spreads into a broader economic downturn.

The good news for Microsoft is that it's probably already sold most of the Office 2007 that is was ever going to, so it's got another couple of years to work on the 'software plus services' vision. But who is to say that Google won't be able to come up with a descendant of Google Docs that will meet the corporate world's requirements in the same timeframe?

Like his predecessor Bill Gates, Ballmer isn't one to shrink from a scrap: "This is a long-term battle [with Google] for our company — and it's one we’ll continue to fight with persistence and tenacity", he wrote.