FE Editorial : Microsoft vs Google

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: The world’s foremost tech titans are making increasingly aggressive forays onto each other’s turfs, and this promises to impact India and the world’s consumers in pretty substantive ways. For Google, Internet search advertising accounts for more than 90% of revenues. Microsoft’s cash cow is Windows, which brings in around 60% of the company’s revenues and runs about 90% of the world’s PCs. In the latest chapters on their battle for supremacy, Microsoft launched Bing as a live search offering while Google has announced a new operating system by the name of Chrome. Yes, that’s a name shared with Google’s one-year-old shot at taking on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer that enjoys around 70% of the browser market—a primacy that’s not a little on account of its being ready-installed as the default browser on nine out of ten PCs. The latest Google announcement came via a blog post on its corporate website. However modest that may appear to Google fans (whose numbers are legion and who consider Microsoft a dishonourable, if not evil, empire), the post’s contents were far from unassuming. VP, product management, Sundar Pichai and engineering director Linus Upson first dismissed existing operating systems as designed in an era when there was no Web. Then, they offered up the vision of an open source, lightweight operating system that would not only supply speed and simplicity, but also completely redesign the security architecture so that users would no longer have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It’s hard to think of a more spectacular undertaking. But wait, the brass tacks are even neater. Not only will the Google software be delivered over the Internet instead of in shrink-wrapped disks, it will be free!