Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft
A CEREBRAL computer-scientist-turned-executive, Eric E. Schmidt has spent much of his career competing uphill against Microsoft, quietly watching it outflank, outmaneuver or simply outgun most of its rivals. — At Sun Microsystems …
Context & Ripple Effects
The rivalry this profile frames has been building in public since 2005, when Bill Gates said he welcomed competition with Google and Microsoft followed within a day by declaring it would aim to trounce Google. What changed by December 2007 is that the contest now runs through Eric Schmidt personally: the piece traces his career at Sun Microsystems, where he spent years competing uphill against Microsoft and watched it outflank or outgun most rivals.
The timing matters because Microsoft enters this showdown stretched thin on several fronts at once: its own coverage describes Windows Mobile as undeniably broken ahead of promised WM7 and WM8 fixes, and Opera has pressed antitrust claims over Internet Explorer lock-in that Microsoft has denied. A direct Google challenge lands on a defender already fighting on regulatory and product-repair fronts.
First-order effects
- Google moves from adjacent skirmishes to a head-on challenge against Microsoft, forcing the company to allocate defense across multiple product lines simultaneously rather than treating Google as a niche web rival.
- Schmidt's Sun Microsystems history becomes strategic context rather than biography — an executive who has studied Microsoft's outflanking playbook from the losing side is now directing attacks against it.
Second-order effects
- Opera's antitrust push over Internet Explorer — which Microsoft denies constitutes abuse of dominant position — gains a potential heavyweight ally if Google's own friction with Microsoft pushes it toward regulatory arguments, raising the cost of Microsoft's bundling defenses.
- Microsoft's admitted weakness in mobile (the broken current platform awaiting WM7/WM8) hands Google an opening to compete where Microsoft cannot quickly respond, pressuring carriers and handset makers to hedge between the two.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry shifts from Microsoft's historical model of winning through platform control toward multi-front competition where no single vendor sets the terms — with regulators increasingly arbitrating what incumbents may bundle.
- A generation of executives formed at Sun-style challengers running large incumbent-facing companies points toward a structural era in which Silicon Valley firms treat Redmond not as the ceiling of ambition but as the target.
The trend: The Google-Microsoft relationship is hardening from coexistence into a full-platform war fought simultaneously across web, mobile, and enterprise software, with antitrust pressure as a secondary battlefield.