Will google take on Microsoft ?

Over the past few weeks, there is an heated discussion going on in the web community regarding whether microsoft will be able retain the title as the "leading software company". If you look at the history of microsoft ,we can find that they visioned the future and worked out to acheive it. Bill gates and paul allen know where they are heading to. The target was clear. And due to this they were able to take on the rivals IBM and began to lead the market.

The idea of softwares selling as a "BOX" is now coming down. It is now called "Software-service" , where the softwares are actually installed in remote systems (huge server machines) and the users just needs a browser to access those services. Users could save their docs in the server space provided by the companies and access them where ever they want. With the huge improvement in bandwidth speed and internet facilites, computers are now becoming as a terminal to the main computer network (Internet).

There are many rivals for microsoft , eg google, yahoo, apple, IBM,etc , but we all know that google is the main rival for microsoft. Bill gates and Ray Ozzie (Current chief software architect of microsoft) current issues memos which confirms the above fact.

But the fact to be considered is google was a company established in 1998 and within 8 years, there are now head to head with the worlds largest software company. The main success behind google is they know where they want to go. They want to give service free to users and get money from advertisers. This is like a Win-Win scenario.

They made their search engine the worlds best search engine. They come up with google earth, google maps, gmail ,google code search, and the recently launched docs and spread sheet. They are quickly adapting the Web 2.0 to all their applications and this is a good decision they made.

The recent aquiring of youtube.com makes the message more clear. If microsoft needs to remain on top , they have to quickly adapt and come up more innovative softwares which run as services and get the acceptance of the users. Windows live.com is a good initiative from them, but need to see how they will be able to carry it forward.