Via cafeconleche a quote from Robert Cringley, "Bill Gates used to worry about Microsoft losing its monopoly overnight because of a technical mistake. We all laughed. We laughed because Microsoft had such financial and sales clout and had the executive suite of nearly every customer company so snowed that they seemed unassailable. But on some level Gates was correct and we've seen that proved by Google."
Which is a pretty lazy analogy. Microsoft still has its operating system monopoly. For all of Apple's success it has made very little inroads into the operating system market. Firefox is an outstanding product but it is no more than 20% of traffic on most sites.
Microsoft is still an operating system and office productivity behemoth. The only thing Google and Microsoft have in common is that they are big tech companies; but they are not in the same market. Google is an advertising reseller, while Microsoft actually sells bundled code into products. They are two different markets.
Microsoft has been trying to get into the search market with Yahoo!, but even there, it is more like Microsoft is buying Time-Warner as Yahoo! is a massive media company, not a search one.
Because Google got big so quickly it has gathered all sorts of mythical attributes in modern media. It was an innovative company, it re-created what we expect from search engines, but also managed to sustain that search functionality through a well executive advertising business model.
Then again mythos sells, in the same way that sensationalism and drama does. Lazy analogies will consistently be the domain of the writer who has to appeal to a mass audience. (reply)
