CNET has an interesting outline of all the things Google is working on. And it's quite clear -- Google is trying to take over the world.
And I for one am glad. As a trusted member of the community, I can help round up adjatators to work in their underground sugar mines.
But on a more serious note, the battle heating up between Microsoft and Google may have very negative long-term consequences for consumers. In the short-run, both are taking slash and burn tactics to one another as one tops the other in releasing free products and services to bring more people into their folds.
Free stuff is great in the short term, but what about the long term? The recently released Analytics.google.com is terrific. It's incredibly powerful. And it's going to likely cause a few dozen companies to go bankrupt. As one goes through the list linked to this article, you can start to see how Google is looking to take over all kinds of segments that others already occupy. But since Google makes so much money right now, they can give it away in exchange for market share.
Microsoft is doing much the same thing with their Live.com initiative. They've been scooping up companies left and right and taking their commercial products and making them free.
Again, in the short-term consumers win. In the long-term, things get murkier. At a certain point, corporations have to satisfy stockholders and they can do that only by increasing the value of their shares. Marketshare has a value but at some point they'll start to saturate that marketshare and then services that don't bring money will either have to be made non-free or they'll die on the vine.
The problem in that event is that most of the products and services they're acquiring required millions of dollars to develop. Even if they die on the vine, it would take years for someone, from scratch, to make a competing product that had enough value-add to justify charging for. The analytics.google.com one is probably the most obvious one since there's so many places that make use of those kinds of services that are about to be severely disrupted.
It will be very interesting to see how this goes in the coming months and next few years. As for me, I've got to go get the "good paper" to polish my resume, I hear they're hiring..
