The Final Days of Google
Back in the 1990s Bill Gates said the company that would eventually beat Microsoft probably had yet to be founded, by which he meant that Microsoft was in such a strong position that only something truly disruptive — a whole new business — would have a chance to unseat Redmond.
Context & Ripple Effects
This column lands at the midpoint of a two-year arc in the Microsoft–Google rivalry. In October 2005, Gates publicly welcomed competition with Google just as Microsoft declared it would trounce the company; by January 2006 the framing had flipped, with the Los Angeles Times describing an industry that felt the 800-pound Google's presence everywhere. The incumbent-challenger roles had visibly reversed.
Cringely's move here is to apply Gates's own 1990s logic — that only a truly new business, probably not yet founded, could displace Microsoft — to Google itself. Worth flagging for readers: the displacement thesis is the columnist's argument alone (no syndicated pickups or public reaction are on record around the May 25, 2007 publication), so it reads as a provocation aimed at the consensus view of Google's invulnerability rather than a settled call.
First-order effects
- Google's dominance is reframed as its chief liability: the column argues the same scale that made Microsoft look unassailable in the 1990s is precisely what makes Google vulnerable to a not-yet-founded challenger.
- Microsoft's concurrent May 2007 moves — Popfly's tie-in to the Facebook Platform, SharePoint integration, and the claim that open source infringes 235 Microsoft patents — read as moat-building against exactly the kind of disruptive newcomer Gates described.
Second-order effects
- The rivalry shifts from products to platforms: by pushing Popfly into Facebook's developer ecosystem, Microsoft contests the developer layer where disruptive challengers historically emerge, pressuring Google to defend mindshare there.
- If the disruption framing gains traction among investors and advertisers, Google's growth premium gets tested against the precedent of Microsoft's own trajectory from unassailable to vulnerable.
Third-order effects
- Gatekeeper leverage rotates: whoever holds the current distribution chokepoint — search and advertising now, the desktop OS before — inherits both the profits and the target, making displacement-by-new-business a recurring structure rather than a one-time event.
- Incumbents facing disruption threats tend to extend platform lock-in through ecosystem bundles and intellectual-property assertions, a defensive pattern that can accelerate the very cycle that produces their successors.
The trend: Web-era gatekeeping is migrating from Microsoft's desktop monopoly toward Google's search-and-advertising stack, with each handoff following the disruption pattern Gates articulated in the 1990s.