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Connectivity

The marketplace is very fragmented. To reach every device you have to target about 14 different platforms. Not every development team has the resources to build it for every platform. We believe over time the browser on mobile devices will be the entry point for many applications. But today the majority of mobile phones don’t have the browser that can do it.

Android is an open source world class mobile stack. We hope the industry will adopt it. The WebKit browser comes with Android.

Cloud computing will give rise to the 'power collaborator', who will "connect with people and find dispersed information across an organization and make it relevant," said speaking in Boston at the Enterprise 2.0 conference continuing through Thursday.

The concept of cloud computing and Enterprise 2.0 Web-based applications and interactivity has apparently struck a positive chord with a fair number of businesses. Up to 69% cite collaboration as a key reason for the appeal of such environments, according to a survey released this week by AIIM, a non-profit group that tackles issues involving document management, content, records, and business processes. Other factors include: Improved agility and responsiveness (56%), faster communications (55%); increased innovation (39%); and a reduction in IT costs (36%).

Google's search business will pass Microsoft's Windows business by early next year (at the latest). Good thing Microsoft has another huge, wildly profitable monopoly: Office. Add that to the calculation, and Microsoft can breathe easy for a few more years:

GOOGLE SEARCH vs MICROSOFT WINDOWS + OFFICE
Quarterly Revenue Q3 2006-Q1 2008

Of course, Google's visible in that Microsoft rearview mirror, too--especially now that it offers a product that is directly competitive with Office.

And then there's the most depressing comparison (from Microsoft's perspective). After 13 years of heavy investment, frequent doubling down, and--until recently--a browser monopoly, here's how Microsoft's online business is doing relative to Google's search business. Remember:

1. Google was founded four years after Microsoft launched its online business, and


2. Microsoft's search business is just a tiny piece of Microsoft Online.

When Windows has a real rival, Microsoft has real problems.

As Blodget notes, there are caveats: The unofficial Office monopoly should give Microsoft breathing room for a few more years. But even that could be threatened as Google's more-affordable Web applications improve.

This storm has been gathering for years. In 2005, we wrote a piece at News.com about Google's longterm threat to Microsoft. The impetus was a major management shuffle at MSN, but we had fun pulling out some old Microsoft memos about now-defunct Netscape in the early days of the World Wide Web. My favorite was a note written in 1995 by Microsoft engineer Ben Slivka describing a "nightmare" scenario for his company.

"The Web...exists today as a collection of technologies that deliver some interesting solutions today, and will grow rapidly in the coming years into a full-fledged platform (underlined for emphasis in the original memo) that will rival--and even surpass--Microsoft's Windows," Slivka wrote.

Microsoft didn't pay too much attention to the warning. Ten years later, another internal memo put a name to that nightmare--Google. Now Blodget has advanced that nightmare scenario a few more steps with his analysis.

Live Mesh as the next information bus

Imagine (not for long will it be ephemeral) an information bus that orchestrates the signaling of text, rich media, calendar, communications, transaction, and group location status under a social graph umbrella based in part on user-controlled behavior aggregation (gestures). Now imagine what Google needs to do to match this architecture and its overwhelming lead in connectors to existing hardware via Windows.

Google’s answer for now is no. There’s no need to attack Mesh directly, but rather continue to iterate on Officenomics while retaining its dominant leads in user credibility and advertiser cloud. But Microsoft can efficiently hybridize Google and other microbig services with the Mesh layer added, creating information bus fail-over to multiple streams (virtual devices) to insure enterprise levels of reliability and security.

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Microsoft has offered to buy the search engine company Yahoo for $44.6 billion (£22.4 bn) in cash and shares.

The offer is 62 percent above Yahoo's closing share price on Thursday