GoogleGazer

Lucky us.

Microsoft and Google live in abject fear, each of the other. This healthy and intensive competition may mean sleepless nights in Redmond and in Mountain View, but it’s great news for the rest of us. We have all benefited massively to the point that powerful laptops go for under $500, gigabytes of email and other goodies are totally free and “to Google” has become a well accepted verb. Will the competition that fostered such benefits continue? Happily, neither titan shows any signs of being willing to concede an inch of turf to the other. So what could have ended up as two monopolists each totally dominating its own space and inevitably breeding stagnation has not happened. Instead what remains is two hard-driving head-to-head competitors, which is all to the public good.

Will it last?

Let’s imagine what could happen. Imagine if Microsoft decided to settle-in for the long haul at what it’s good at - dominating the desktop and Enterprise segments while spinning off MSN and other money-losing distractions, while Google settled for dominating… well, everything else.

Dream over. Wake up. It’s not going to happen. Just as Jerry Yang kissed off the deal of a life-time, and more money than he could ever spend - screwing his shareholders out of a premium of probably $8 a share over what Yahoo is possibly worth, so you can bet on Steve Ballmer’s outsized ego trumping his considerable financial acumen and business judgment. Bill G left him in charge and Steve desperately wants to show Bill that he made a wise decision. He’s not a man to admit defeat or to retrench. In fact, it wants desperately to beat Google at its own game, as it once beat Netscape, and to dominate not just the desktop and the Enterprise, but search and mobile technology as well. And please, don’t forget games.

And while it seems better-positioned to do so, Google is equally intent on annihilating Yahoo and MSN in search, dominating such spaces as mobile communication, where it may go head-to-head with the big boys like Verizon, and AT&T as well as Apple, the re-surging techno-giant. If that’s not enough, they also have designs on the desktop, trying to make Google Apps more and more fully-featured and more operative off-line, and hence a credible replacement for Microsoft Office. And by the way, in Google’s view, who needs a desktop any more anyway?

It’s a truism that desperate people do desperate things. And some of these competing giants, not to speak of the cable companies may feel very threatened and as we said, desperate companies do desperate things.

Detente?

I don’t think so.