Filed under: Competitive strategy, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Battle of the Brands
This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.
Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) has been around more than 30 years now and continues to make money hand over first every quarter. Its growth has slowed to levels representative of a mature company, but the power the computer software maker has over the flow of the world’s information is very formidable. Then you have Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), a company just a decade old but with power that rivals Microsoft in many ways. In a sense, Microsoft provides the river, and Google provides the current.
That’s probably not what Microsoft executives had in mind, but that’s reality. The two companies are uniquely different cultures: Microsoft is a standard, dyed-in-the-wool, buttoned-down corporation and Google operates in an organized chaos type of way, much like a start-up software company. The difference is that Google’s revenue and growth is slowly reaching where Microsoft’s is, and it’s only taken a fraction of the time.
Now that Google is starting to deploy online-based software “products” (webware, if you will) that compete head-on with Microsoft’s products, is a showdown between these two brands imminent? News flash — it’s already here, a fact Microsoft may nor may not realize. Now, dethroning the world’s largest software maker may seem impossible to many of us, and it very well may be impossible. But that may not be Google’s goal; it may want Microsoft to just become irrelevant, which would be a self-imposed death sentence in a way.
By 2015 or so, we’ll have a very clear picture of the competitive landscape between these two, but if today is any indication, Microsoft’s largest challenge in its history is well under way.
Vote in our poll for Microsoft or Google as your preferred brand, and let us know in the comments why you love it.
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