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Google V. Microsoft outlooked in MIT’s Technology Review

This month’s (January 2005) Tech Review has a lengthy piece where Charles Ferguson, veteran of past battles with Microsoft (founded Vermeer, maker of FrontPage, in the midst of the browser wars) looks at What’s Next for Google. The piece is well worth a read, as it puts the current search environment (the overview of which is a draft post I’ve never had time to complete) in perspective - both as the next frontier and as the setting for a standards battle.

One point I think Ferguson did miss was when he wrote,

Two Google employees (both of whom prefer not to be named) told me that Google’s leaders believe that the company’s expertise in infrastructure—knowing how to build and operate those 250,000 servers—constitutes a competitive advantage more important than APIs or standards. This could be a major, even fatal, error. Microsoft can certainly obtain or cultivate the skills necessary to operate large-scale computing infrastructures; indeed, it already operates MSN, with nearly 10 million users.

is the whole of the Gmail and Blogger initiatives. Looking at those two projects, Google is moving to host and support (and technically, thereby, own and control access to) customers’ data. It’s this aspect of Google’s business that goes beyond simply the operational wherewithal necessary to operate this infrastructure, what Gartner called “Tera Architectures” in a Symposium 2004 presenation, Tera Architectures Emerge from the Lab. In terms of testbed for development of new algorithms and advertising schemes, as well as adding that personal element that John Battelle noted as being missing from Google when it’s compared to Yahoo! in these two posts: here and here. We’ll see how it plays out.