In business, you play offense by innovating and
outperforming your competition. You may play
defense if you need to catch up to your
competition.
In thinking of ways to make Google look back,
Microsoft is doing neither. They are sitting
in the stands trying to distract the other
team.
=Allen
It turns out Microsoft has been busy holding weekly “Screw Google” meetings, trying to figure out how to throw roadblocks in front of Google as they continue to dominate the search arena. It’s easy for me to say, but doesn’t it make a lot more sense to spend millions of dollars making something that’s actually better than Google rather than simply trying to make them look bad?
I wonder how long it will take before the “Screw Microsoft” meetings commence? Probably never. It probably won’t happen because Microsoft is doing a good enough job themselves, and I like to think Google is smart enough to know money is much better spent elsewhere.
It’s likely Microsoft is grasping at straws as Bing’s market share has only increased a very small amount — even after their massive marketing campaign. In addition to that, Google is stepping on Microsoft’s toes with two of their own operating systems (Android and Chrome OS), Google Chrome internet browser, Google Docs, Gmail and their own Enterprise efforts.
It’s time for Microsoft to stop wasting their money worrying about Google, and start breaking their own trails. Microsoft does have some diamonds in their rough though — one example is their development tools, frameworks and platforms. This includes WPF, Silverlight and Microsoft Surface — and in my opinion, Microsoft needs to invest more heavily in those technologies.
