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Article: Google is Out-Microsofting Microsoft

It’s fascinating to compare different types of technology companies. One can divide them into two camps: the ones that innovate by improving the past and the ones that plain copy poorly, but use their might to succeed.

On one hand you have the Googles, the Sonys, the Apples, the Amigas, the BeOses of the world, and the other you have Microsofts and Yahoos. For the purpose of this article, let’s focus on Microsoft, Apple, and Google.

Microsoft copied many of the key ideas of the graphical user interface from Apple and Xerox, however the actual implementation was worse in execution than its predecessors. Windows 3.1 crashed constantly and wasn’t intuitive in daily use. You can make similar analogies with Excel vs. Lotus 123, PowerPoint vs. Freelance, and Word vs. Wordperfect.

We can also never forget “plug’n play” or rather “plug’n pray” for USB peripherals on Windows 95 and Windows 98. The most impressive feature of Windows XP was how digital cameras and USB compact flash drives actually worked when you plugged them in. Compare this to Apple which had an easy-to-use GUI and had peripherals that simply worked the first time.

Let’s take a look at Google. This company knows how to take a basic, known concept and improve upon it dramatically using their smarts. They took basic search technology and improved it with better algorithms based on link relevancy. Google Ads is the fastest growing revenue producer on the net. In many ways, Google copied Overture’s idea of text ads from relevant search results. However by leveraging Google’s reach and innovating by using content sites to host “automatically relevant” text banner ads next to any content, Google went above and beyond what Overture had done. The list can go on and on: GoogleNews, Google Toolbar, etc.

The latest craze is the Google affiliated social network started by an engineer named Orkut. If you look at the search page on Orkut, it’s almost a carbon copy of Friendster with boxes for age, activities, and characteristics. The differentiations are how Orkut actually works at a usable speed and the implementation of some killer features such as communities forums and the friend “karma” ratings.

The “karma” ratings let friends designate secret crushes on people in their network. If both sides designate a crush on each other, Orkut let’s them know they like each other. Simply brilliant execution like this is how Google truly innovates on the shoulders of others. Google knows how to do what Microsoft dreams to do, even Bill Gates complimented Google’s innovation and IQ quotient in interviews.

On the side-note, it’s amusing to see the various testimonials on Orkut written by the Google co-founders and Orkut himself. One co-founder accuses Orkut of creating the site “just to gain new friends.” Orkut himself has “dating women” as an objective for himself on his profile.