MuSoft vs Google

Jan 9 issue of New York Magazine on the decline of MuSoft (below)

Then we have MuSoft bowing to the Feds on requests for search data (what, where and when) while Google resists.
Having lost the fight, MuSoft seems to say ... but you better go after those guys over there.

Data : November Nielsen//NetRatings :
"At the top would be Google, which snared 46.3 percent of search
queries in November 2005. Almost 2.4 billion searches wound their
way through the Google server farms. Yahoo held its place at second
on this list, with a 23.4 percent share and 1.194 billion queries
received, parsed, and tossed back to the user.

That takes care of the billionaires of search share. MSN Search at
number three picked up 11.4 percent of the November '05 search
market, 583 million queries. AOL Search was tops in single digit
share, 6.9 percent and 350 million searches handled."

46.3% vs 11.4%
No wonder Billy G is willing to give up to the Justice Dept ... if it can hurt Google.


Microsoft's Bill Gates Wants to Save the World - New York Magazine:

"The Softening of a Software Man'

In 2000, Gates stepped down as CEO and assumed his current title: chairman and chief software architect. The official line at Microsoft was that he was reenergized, reinvigorated, up to his elbows in the company’s future, shepherding new products and formulating new strategies. But by the time I saw him a couple of years later at a conference in California, it was clear to all in the auditorium that software no longer got Gates’s juices pumping the way his work at the foundation did. Technology questions were answered quickly, without passion, whereas questions about global health elicited lengthy disquisitions full of detail and emotion. The way he talked about wiping out malaria was how he used to talk about wiping out Netscape.

Ever since then, Microsoft has noticeably been drifting. Not that the company isn’t still enormously profitable and doesn’t exercise terrific clout in the markets where its products are entrenched. But there’s no escaping the impression of an outfit beset by strategic blurriness and lumbering middle age—or disguising the fact that, despite countless fervent if flailing efforts, Microsoft is getting its ass kicked handily in the race to rule the Internet. Here you have Yahoo, trouncing MSN as an all-purpose Web portal. And there you have Apple, crushing it in online music. Here you have poor, doom-struck AOL, beating it in e-mail and instant messaging. And there, most glaringly, you have Google, whipping Gates’s company in Web search and advertising—and the crucial competition for top-drawer talent."

Nowhere is Microsoft’s decline more keenly felt (or warmly welcomed) than in Silicon Valley. “Ten years ago,” observes Joe Kraus, one of the founders of Excite, “if you were starting up a company, you assumed that Microsoft already had ten engineers working full-time on the same thing, and they were probably going to eat your lunch. But you don’t say that anymore about Microsoft. You say it about Google. They’re the 10,000-pound gorilla now.”

For Gates, then, losing out on the AOL deal to Google—a deal he’d personally been involved in negotiating, courting Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons at last year’s Allen & Co. summer retreat in Sun Valley—would have been all the more painful for what it represents. For 25 years after Microsoft’s founding in 1975, Gates labored furiously to see that his company would escape the fate that befell his archrival IBM, along with every other technology outfit that rose to dominance in one era, then slid into senescence in the next. Yet now he sees his precious baby veering dangerously in the direction of becoming the new Big Blue: large, profitable, and stuffed with happy employees, but feared or followed by no one. Unimportant, in a word.