“Early this month, Neil Holloway, president of Microsoft EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), said that in six months Microsoft’s search engine ‘will be more relevant’ to the consumer than Google’s. It is no coincidence that Holloway used the word “relevant.” In high tech more than in any other industry, if your technology has been bypassed by the newer and better, you’re dead. Maintaining your relevancy is Job One. And for years, it has been Microsoft’s Achilles’ heel,” Ephraim Schwartz writes for InfoWorld. Now, “we have the sad spectacle of Microsoft announcing Microsoft Live — once again late to the table — as if it were suddenly going to own the SaaS (software as a service) space when it didn’t even have a ‘relevant’ product to accompany its announcement.”
“…There is a lot of history and significance behind Holloway’s statement. But for me, it was an unfortunate boast that just highlights how far behind Microsoft really is. Yes, Google’s search engine is a high-profile target for competitors, but Google has moved well beyond being the best search engine on the block. Google established that beachhead several years ago. It is now busy leveraging it by making inroads into the enterprise (with the Google Search Appliance) and even more directly onto the desktop (with Google Desktop),” Schwartz writes. “Google is looking for fiber-optics engineers. Why? Perhaps, some say, because they will soon be offering streaming applications over the Internet. Choose your operating system and the apps you want to use, and Google will stream them to you directly. The point is, Microsoft’s boast that it will have a better search engine in six months sounds like too little, too late. Microsoft looks like a drowning man, flailing around in a huge ocean, desperately trying to find land. We are witnessing the end of an era. I’m not sure that any one company will ever hold sway over an industry the way Microsoft did, but I am sure that the enterprise has far more options now that it ever has — and will be increasingly inclined to use them.”
Full article here.
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