Google Vs Microsoft

The battle between Google Vs Microsoft has been 'the' battle of the decade. There was lot at the stakes. But in last 3-4 years, Apple & Facebook has entered into the fray to become future market leader of the internet world. All the four companies has huge cash surplus to invest, so now money is not going to be the deciding factor.

Microsoft has been the leader of desktop operating system for the last two decades. No company has been able to come up with a product which can give serious competition to Windows till now. Google is planning to come up with its own operating system next year which will be termed as "Chrome" same as the browser launched by Google earlier.

In the browser war, Google is steadily cutting into the market share of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. It was launched in September 2008, since then it is gaining market share at the expense of IE. Market share of Firefox & Apple's Safari is almost constant in this time frame.

For more information about the market share you can also check out the wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Looking from the future perspective, Microsoft has lost one major battle, which is to control the market share of mobile's operating system. Within one year Google has made huge strides to increase its market share from 3.9 percent to 17.7 percent.

Within Mobile operating system space, Currently Symbian leads the race with 40.1 percent market share which is hit by the rising popularity of Android. Last year its market share was 46.9 percent. Third place is currently occupied by RIM ( Research in Motion -  makers of Blackberry), which will be hugely contested by Apple's iOS.

You can refer to Gartner report for current statistics related to market share in the mobile space:
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1434613

Presently Internet in accessed mainly through laptops, this trend is bound to change in coming 2-3 years when  our 80% of the requirements would be fulfilled by the applications on our smartphone. The usage/penetration of smartphone is rising exponentially in U.S & in European markets.

Last year Morgan Stanley came up with a report where it predicted that smartphones "will out-ship the global notebook + netbook market in 2010E and out-ship the global PC market (notebook + netbook + desktop) by 2012E."

The platform for the next technological battleground is all set.

Kindly leave your comments about how the technological world may shape up in the coming years. I world like to use these blogs as a platform where we can share views about the changing paradigm in tech world.