I swear, soon I’ll stop posting constantly about Google, but an article in yesterday’s New York Times just caught my attention. Entitled “Relax, Bill Gates; It’s Google’s Turn as the Villain”, the article bangs on about how Silicon Valley entrepreneurs think Google is taking over Microsoft’s evil reign.

One upstart even proclaims that “Google is doing more damage to innovation in the Valley right now than Microsoft ever did”. You what? How can Google possibly be doing anything that halts innovation? Their products in the past couple of years have had a hell of a lot of influence, surely.

Their original selling point, when they were simply a search engine, was to me the simplicity. With MSN, even six months ago, you’d open up the search page and be bombarded with adverts, celebrity gossip and links to the Gardening section. All you wanted was to find out who won the 1978 World Cup, and it’s taken a minute and a half to open the page.

And now look at the new MSN search page. It searches web pages, news, images, and they even have their own version of Desktop Search.

And the Microsoft search engine isn’t the only system which has taken its cue from Google.

Look at the new Hotmail beta. Or their version of Google’s personalised homepage, Start.com. Hell, they might have had MSN Maps for years, but Virtual Earth was only put together after Google went forth and released Google Earth and Maps.

My understanding of ‘innovation’ is pushing technology to it’s limits. Doing something that forces even your stronger rivals to out-do you just to keep them on their toes. If that’s not what Google is doing, then I must be reading from the wrong dictionary.

Who bets that in a few months time, MSN will announce a new instant messenger, with better audio capabilities? Don’t doubt it.

Tags: Google, Microsoft