Poor Google?

I’ve been watching the outrage over the Microsoft-4-Yahoo! bid with mild interest and surprise at the angle that the general blogging public has taken against Microsoft! If I didn’t know any better it would seem like Microsoft is this giant evil behemoth just one secret ingredient away from conquering the world of technology. Cranking out billions and billions of dollars in profit, the Yahoo! takeover would catapult the company…. <Reality Mode: On>

The company whose major invention over the past three years has been a fucking table! The company that is facing a going concern on every major front: desktop, office, entertainment, online and mobility. The company that is struggling to limp under the weight of its own enormity, led by men defeated more than a decade ago bringing back the same concepts they lost with and ended up under Microsoft’s umbrella in the first place – the decades in which Microsoft won by pulling dirty tricks, abusing monopoly powers and competing in an environment in which everyone operated under the exact same principle – cash for product.

Times have changed, Microsoft has more enemies than it has friends, and even its friends are there solely for the economic benefit of an astonishing install base – all while investing in the areas where the future is going – away from Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop and infrastructure server.

That, dear friends, makes Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo! and admission of inability to compete in the new world, not it’s one magic puzzle piece to the top.

Microsoft is on the defense from Google, Apple, Linux, Apple, IBM, Sun and Oracle in all major businesses. Microsoft’s product and innovation pipeline is not market building, it is market sustaining – at best – more of the same old debt driven infrastructure simply because it fits with the rest of the indebted infrastructure in the workplace.

Microsoft is the same company today that it was 10 years ago, only the version numbers have changed. Except today we have true alternatives.

These aren’t the words of some laid off English major, turned half baked blogger. These are words of someone that has built a business by betting on Microsoft. We continue to do so, in the Microsoft realm, but I would be a liar if I told you we’d bet one red penny on Microsoft’s online strategies.

That said, any market with a single dominant player and the competitors in the dust is bad. So you know what, let Microsoft dump some money into Yahoo! and give Google a run for its money. Last time I checked, Google was not a non-profit charity, they just haven’t had the chance to be as evil as Microsoft, yet. Let’s not give them, or anyone else for that matter, that chance.