Microsoft: ready to compete with Google

In recent months, Microsoft’s head of software design, Ray Ozzie, had framed Google as a stimulus to launch the Redmond company on still little-explored fronts. Microsoft’s strategies and words, legal skirmishes aside, seem to demonstrate its intention to compete with Google on equal terms and without fear, even now that Gates is preparing to leave the company, to hand it over to the Ballmer-Ozzie-Mundie triumvirate. .

One of the directions in which Microsoft moves with determination is the expansion of its core business. Without giving up the goal of one billion installed Windows and the release of Windows 7 within the next three years, Microsoft is starting to admit some changes on the subject. During the Financial Analyst Meeting it was Gates himself who envisaged a diversification of the corporate strategy by proposing a combinatorial approach between the profitable Microsoft business model, and the software as a service of Google applications, in view of a real convergence centered on the user. The Web will be the platform, according to the formula coined by Tim ÒReilly, to offer complementary web services with the traditional “software in the box” offered by Microsoft. Software that, in the opinion of WebProNews will maintain its undisputed dominance on the market, while remaining far from free for the user, contrary to what happens for the countless Google Apps. However, Microsoft is not lacking in attempts to follow BigG’s strategy: ZDNet has been gathering rumors about the upcoming release of Microsoft Works, which is expected to be free and ad-supported.

Similarly, Microsoft begins to propose itself as Google tracker in advertising . While BigG struggles to re-emerge from the antitrust affair triggered by the acquisition of DoubleClick, according to Google itself, enthusiastic about the growth of competitiveness, Microsoft has worked to scrape together deals and absorb companies. First move, the acquisition of aQuantive. This is followed, in order, by the agreement that ensured the management of the product placement for five Electronic Arts titles to the Massive Network in-game advertising platform; the agreement to broadcast advertising on Digg and the acquisition of AdECN, a company that operates as a link between publishers and advertisers in the field of display advertising. A strategy that, managed and supported by the newly established Internet Services Research Center (ISRC) working group, could take off the adCenter platform, leading Microsoft to become the “advertising power” in which Ballmer believes.

It is the New York Times, in a long interview with Bill Gates, that sets up another front on which Microsoft and Google could find themselves competing: the smartphone market , in which BigG seems to have moved on the software front, despite the proliferation of rumors that seemed to anticipate the advent of a real GPhone device. Even in this case, Microsoft flaunts security: Gates predicts that Google has no possibility of undermining the solid 10% of the market held by Microsoft with Windows Mobile and seems to believe naive those who expect a future of free telephony and branded Google, which Gates defines as a company that “has developed about thirty products, of which only one profitable”.

It is in this stimulating context that the chairman of Microsoft is preparing to gradually abandon his posts to dedicate himself to charity. A transitional scenario that Craig Mundie and Ray Ozzie, in agreement with Gates, believe to represent right juncture for the co-founder of the colossus of Redmond to give way to them. But it is the New York Times itself that takes up the statements of Gates, who, perhaps unable to give up playing a role of weight in this landscape full of challenges, “plans to remain deeply involved in certain areas of the company”.

Gaia Bottà