In the past month two juggernauts of the tech world have made announcements with the potential to shape the competitive landscape on the web for the next decade. Microsoft announced Bing, a "decision engine" looking to make inroads on Google's unstoppable dominance in search. Initial reports indicate Microsoft has built a worthy alternative. I say worthy because whilst Bing is a vast improvement over Live, it doesn't seem to be bringing anything game changing. In other words, people will use it as a compliment rather than a replacement to Google Search. Ultimately, the attempt is reflective of Google's current attempt at displacing Microsoft in the enterprise. Google Apps is worthy and some might say superior but ultimately not compelling enough for companies to disrupt decades of development and business process around the Microsoft stack. Earlier this week I watched a joint interview with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates from 2007. What struck me about both their success was that they dared to be different, they were bold and they took risks. This was to be the catalyst for their dominance in their respective markets. In 1985 Microsoft bet on the Windows Graphical User Interface and won emphatically, dominating the desktop for the next 2 decades. In 2001, Apple launched the iPod which is now the "default" music player. Both of these strategies were bold, some might say audacious even. So it was with great interest that I watched the announcement and demo of Google Wave at Google I/O. Techcrunch does a great job of breaking down Google Wave. An open collaboration platform which wants to be your social network of choice at home and your productivity toolset at work. Also interesting is that by allowing companies to run Waves behind the firewall Google has enroached on Microsoft's "software plus services" mantra (albeit in an opensource non-threatening kinda way). In those one and a half hours, Google Wave presented an audacious idea not unlike Microsoft's efforts two decades earlier.
"We made a bet that the paradigm shift would be the graphical user interface" - Bill Gates
