SEARCH n DESTROY!

This one is not related to 'George Bush-Iraq'. Instead, it scrutinizes the Next Big Thing in the dotcom rivalry: Google Vs. Microsoft.

Google is a rival unlike any Gates has faced in a long time. In previous battles, Microsoft always had a powerful trump card: Control over the Windows operating system. That meant that when consumers bought a PC, Microsoft had a powerful say in which products and services they saw first. It had pricing power and distribution power over competitors. Because of that, its applications didn't have to be superior to those of the competitors-just roughly equal. Windows wasn't better than the Macintosh; Word didn't improve on WordPerfect, or Excel on Lotus. Even Explorer was only as good as Netscape. Microsoft genius was integrating them seamlessly to make them easy for customers to default to, and then using its marketing,distribution, and pricing clout. It won by attacking competitor's business models, not their technology.

Microsoft's array of weapons has so far proved next to useless against Google. For one thing, any attempt to bundle search with its products will probably be scrutinized by antitrust regulators. Meanwhile, you no longer need a PC to use Google. It works fine from a Treo, a BlackBerry, a cellphone, a television, an Apple, or a Linux computer, any device with some kind of keyboard and Internet access. Nor can Microsoft undercut the price of Google software as it did with Netscape, Google is already free. There's no quick and easy way to lure away Google's online advertisers either. They pay based on the price of a keyword in a search and on how many times users click on the ad, but Google doesn't control that, it's set by auction. Says a former Microsoft executive: "Microsoft can play its old game to compete with Linux and Apple. It has to play Google's game to compete with Google."

Now lets look at what Gates has got in his arsenal. Google may be hugely profitable and a Wall Street darling, but it is also a young company, largely controlled by its founders and dealing with the unavoidable pains of torrid growth. Oddsmakers would say the likelihood of its stumbling is high. and no one is better at outlasting the competition than Gates. Certainly the search game is still in its infancy. Only a fraction of the content available online is actually searchable. For instance, even subscribers can't search current and archived issues of the Wall Street Journal or most other publications with a search engine; you have to go to the publication's site. This suggests that the search engine that can get the world to list premium content or its platform will have a leg up on the competition. Microsoft has plenty of money to buy the rights to such content; it also owns powerful digital-rights-management software, which helps copyright holders control who uses their products and how often. Those should be advantages in negotiations with companies worried about losing control of copyrighted text, music, and video on the Net.

Another advantage for Gates & Co. is that search engines are still technologically primitive. They can't understand context. For example; if you type "chip", they can't tell whether you are looking for a snack food or high-tech equipment. As a result all the big search engines are scrambling to find ways to make search more personalized. The thinking is that the more a search engine knows about who is searching, the more accurate the results will be. Both Google and Microsoft have the foundations of such a product in its desktop-search software, which can tell what you have on your hard drive. Perhaps Microsoft, because it understands Windows better than any other company, will be able to offer faster, more accurate searches.

It would be far to early to arrive at a concensus, as to who would emerge as a winner in this War.
Rest assured, its gonna get very fierce in due course and ya, there shall be fireworks.