Battle of the Tech Titans 81
garzpacho writes "BusinessWeek has a look at the big tech alliances that have been announced recently. From the article: 'In the war for dominance of the Net, May 25 turned out to be a big day for alliance making... The pairings highlight the importance the fast-growing, $12.5 billion Internet ad market and the race to get in front of as many Web surfers as possible. The alliance with eBay gives Yahoo a way to narrow a lead by Google in generating advertising sales. Paring with Dell, meantime, helps Google muscle in on Microsoft's dominance of the desktop. These alliances are predicated as a response to a looming threat...'"
Internet Ad Market - don't we all block ads? (Score:5, Interesting)
Except for the simple microAds from Google, and which now appear all over the place, everything else I, or my company, block. Popups are blocked, ad sites are blocked. Sites that get too annoying with javascript ads, or use annoying pass-through ad pages too often, I stop visiting.
How much more $$$ can there actually be for advertisers on the web? Isn't everyone doing all they can to block these annoyances? Seems like the alliances will be irrelevant.
trivial nitpick (Score:4, Interesting)
Pairing with Dell. Paring with Dell makes it sound like they're making pies.
Mmmmm. Googledell pie.
Re:Google Competing with Microsoft? (Score:2, Interesting)
No doubt from the very public dick size contest they've got going on between them.
Where they get the idea that the subject is of any interest to anyone else is beyond me. Maybe business publications have gotten into a dick size contest with the National Inquirer or something.
KFG
Re:Dell+Google = Overblown (Score:4, Interesting)
The larger issue in this case is the 12.5 billion dollar online advertising market. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are trying to generate revenue by serving up advertising. Because Google is integrating their toolbar and desktop search on Dell PCs, Microsoft is losing potential revenue that would have been generated by Dell shipping PCs with their browsers automatically feeding people into MSN.
On the subject of advertising, Microsoft is obviously flailing. They are trying to do too many things at once. That is good news for people who are taking aim at their core OS / application business, but bad news for people using Microsoft software.
Re:Google Competing with Microsoft? (Score:2, Interesting)
Considering MS has pretty much said they intend to kill Google as the dominant search engine, the competition is pretty obvious. Though to be more specific it's really more like MSN vs Google competing for web supremacy.
Ever since I saw question #5 on the Google Labs Aptitude Test [wolfram.com], "What's wrong with Unix? How would you fix it?", I've always wondered if Google was working on an OS of their own on the sly. If I was Microsoft, I'd be extremely worried about this prospect, since pretty much every Google offering has randomly appeared on the Google Labs site, for the most part with very little fanfare.
Not to say that it is or is not likely (that's a question I'm in no position to answer), but imagine what it would do to MS if a free Google-flavored Linux distro popped up without warning two weeks before Vista shipped? If there's one company out there that could/would concievably try to make such a thing and get it idiot-proof enough to let the average non-tech person use it effectively (this isn't a bait, but none of the current distributions are there, yet), it's Google. And I think the company has enough goodwill stored up (not to mention the media darling status it has attained) that people would actually pay attention to it and give it a try, even if it was bundled with Google Pack or some other way for Google to monetize. Needless to say, this would all but cement Linux as the operating system of choice for the concievable future, since there would finally be an incentive for everyone to create Linux versions of their programs instead of (or along with) Mac and Windows ones if a reasonable percentage of people were using it.
So if I was Bill Gates, I'd be wetting myself over the Google problem. It's not that Google has indicated any desire to destroy Microsoft, it's that they would stand a fighting chance if they decided to give it a go. No company has ever had that power before, so it's quite rational that MS wants to squash them before the tables turn.