More on Microsoft Vs Google

Stumbled on this well researched article written by Fred Vogelstein where he provides a far more insightful account on what makes this match so interesting. And by interesting I mean, more anticipated and watchable. It's sure gonna provide entertainment and loads of hindsight learnings.

Few quotes that defines this rivalry..

Google has even had the nerve to set up an office five miles down the road from Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., headquarters. Its opening last November was supposed to be an invitation-only affair, but word spread and by 7 p.m. the place was swarming with dozens of uninvited Microsofties—casually, and sometimes not so casually, looking for work.

[...]

The price for being slow-footed became abundantly clear last fall: Google beat Microsoft to market with desktop-search software by two months.

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"Here Microsoft was spending $600 million a year in R&D for MSN, $1 billion a year for Office, and $1 billion a year for Windows, and Google gets desktop search out before us? It was a real wake-up call," says an exec. "It was the first time many people in the corporation understood that Google was more than just a search engine.

I particularly like this tongue-in-cheek comment where Schmidt literally calls Microsoft as a previous-generation company.

What does Google make of Microsoft's growing animosity and paranoia?
Although neither the co-founders nor CEO Schmidt would comment for this story,
Schmidt told an audience of Internet pioneers at UCLA last fall, "One of the
criticisms that the media makes is to compare Google to previous-generation
companies. Google is trying to solve the next problem, not the last problem."

Read the full article here. Worth every page.