Battle of the giants II

A while back I wrote about the Battle of the Browsers between Opera’s Opera, Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox versus Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. From the look of things, the axis of good have won with the recent announcement by Microsoft that they will be shipping Windows 7 to Europe without IE.

It just makes me wonder if it’s going to be like that for the rest of the world? Picture this scenario, after removing Vista from your personal computer and installing Windows 7, you’ll get all excited you got rid of the monster only to be confronted with the fact that there is no browser. Obviously you will want to fire it up, get on the internet and download drivers and stuff you need when you are hit by the shock of no browser. Of course, in a cheeky way, Microsoft will provide a way for the user to download and install IE and other browsers, but guess what, this could also be very unfair to the other browsers as Microsoft could use in their favour over the others.

Another battle of a different kind is brewing on the horizon with Google’s recent announcement by its vice-president of product management, Sundar Pichai, of the Google blog that they will be launching with the Google Chrome operating system. It will be open source and very lightweight, targeted for the netbook market in the second half of 2010. On hearing about this Bill Gates, in his interview with CNET news, suggested that it sounded more like Linux.

He said: “There are many, many forms of Linux operating systems out there, and packaged in different ways, and booted in different ways. So I don’t know anything in particular about what Google is doing. But, in some ways I’m surprised people are acting like there’s something new.”

But then doesn’t he have a reason to be worried? Google took the search market away from Yahoo after all!

With this announcement from Google, it also raises more questions than answers and the fact that it’s open source and free makes it more interesting. Google so far have managed to get way ahead of Microsoft on the web. Microsoft has tried all kinds of strategies — lately with Bing — formerly Live Search, Windows Live Search and MSN Search but it has been fruitless. Anyway, with the Google Chrome OS, I hope it’s the beginning of a serious challenge to Microsoft’s dominance of the operating system market.

At the end of the day, competition is good from time to time. Let’s wait and see.