Browser Advertising Google vs. Micrososft

The two videos show the advertising for web Browsers from Microsoft and Google. ( via paidcontent)

Adverting video for IE8 from Micrososft



Advertising video for Chrome from Google



Judge the coolness factor by yourself.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Together with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg at D5

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs together interviewed by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg of "All Things Digital" at D5.

Videos showing the personal and emotional side of both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates particularly towards at the end of the Interview especially the ending of the Interview.

It is a journey through the memory lane in which two founders of PC industry discuss their relationship that was friendly and rocky at the same time. It shows some of the behind the scene activities and relationship that existed between Apple and Microsoft.

Very informative and personal.

The highlight video that provides the summary of the entire interview



This is the prologue before the interview



Part One



Part Two



Part Three



Part Four



Part Five



Part Six



Part Seven

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Microsoft Commercial with Jerry Sienfeld

Very interesting use of symbols. Two famous icons.



If the association with humor does not work they can always fall back to this.


Image by Getty Images via Daylife











Make MS product sexy. They will have to fight Apple to win this image.

Compared to this here is what Nicholas Carr has to say about Google, the Microsoft competitor on its 10th anniversary.

But while Google has an odd business model, it's not an unprecedented one. The company it most resembles is, ironically, its archrival, Microsoft. Just as Google controls the central money-making engine of the Internet economy (the search engine), Microsoft controlled the central money-making engine of the personal computer economy (the PC operating system). In the PC world, Microsoft had nearly as many complements as Google now has in the Internet world, and Microsoft, too, expanded into a vast number of software and other PC-related businesses - not necessarily to make money directly but to expand PC usage. Microsoft didn't take a cut of every dollar spent in the PC economy, but it took a cut of a lot of them. In the same way, Google takes a cut of many of the dollars that flow through the Net economy. The goal, then, is to keep expanding the economy.

and finally the contrast between the two

Google differs from Microsoft in at least one very important way. The ends that Microsoft has pursued are commercial ends. It's been in it for the money. Google, by contrast, has a strong messianic bent. The Omnigoogle is not just out to make oodles of money; it's on a crusade - to liberate information for the masses - and is convinced of its righteousness in pursuing its cause. Depending on your point of view as you look forward to the next ten years, you'll find that either comforting or not.

It is a interesting contrast in mission between the two big companies and that allows Google to do this to help build the Internet ecosystem and profit from it.

It routinely introduces half-finished products and services as online “betas” because it knows that, even if the offerings fail to win a big share of the market, they will still tend to produce attractive returns by generating advertising revenue and producing valuable data on customer behavior. For most companies, a failed launch of a new product is very costly. For Google, in general, it’s not. Failure is cheap.

That would explain how they can release an open source browser Google Chrome in an over crowded browser market and do not worry about the financial losses they will suffer in supporting this activity.

The Management Crises

Image via WikipediaRight now we are going through another burst of bubble caused by the sub prime lending by the most conservative institution of the Industry the banks. They were supposed to be the institutions that people can trust and place their life savings with them. The CEO's from banking industry are considered the pillars of the society. So what happened? It all can not simply be explained away by blaming it on the excessive greed of bankers. Something more deeper malaise at work here. As usual the tax payers will be paying for the bill that the bank failure will create. Another news recently was that GM lost close to 16 billion dollars. These are staggering numbers. Any other business with that kind of losses will have closed by now. Again some thing missing from the explanation provided by the mainstream presses for the loss.

It all shows that managing business has become very complex affair. People are expecting too much from the miracle worker CEO's who are consistently failing to deliver what they promise. As a result they have perfected the art of creating smoke screens. All of them need PR departments to avoid answers to hard questions. At the same time they will not let go their monolithic, hierarchical style of management. None of them are willing to learn how to manage complexity. Any time a problem comes around immediately a new administrative position is created to deal with the problem leading to creating even more complexity without any solution to the original problem.

Umair Haque at Harvard Business Review explaining edge economy and how Obama used the principles of Edge economy to win the democratic nomination. Even companies like Google are using the principle of "Edge Economy" effectively to win against well entrenched competitor such as Microsoft.

In this video he talks about the shrinking brand and how Google can become a brand name without investing lot of money in marketing and advertising.


Managing technology and technology related businesses is complex because of the need of large amount of information that is needed to manage knowledge workers. IBM for most part followed the old hierarchical style of management to serve the businesses who followed the same style of management. The next version of tech company who became prominent is Microsoft and had one technologist(Bill gates) and one marketer(Steve Ballmer) at the top. Even Apple had the duo of Steve and Steve. One Engineer and one marketer. Now if we look at the top echelon of Google it is a troika and all three top people have background in Engineering. Does that mean that in the future the high tech companies will be run by techies? A management focused on outcomes and delivering it not on empire building and obfuscation.

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Microsoft purchases Powerset Search Engine

Image by asmythie via FlickrGoogle is the undisputed king of search. According to compete.com they are also the #1 most visited portal with 135,291,588 unique visitors per month. They are leveraging this advantage into promoting other Google products such as Google docs etc. that compete directly with Microsoft. This effectively challenges the number one position of Microsoft.

Microsoft had been trying to compete in the search space with not much success. They also see the problem posed by the Google's threat to their monopoly. They tried to acquire Yahoo, number two portal on the web but failed. Recently, they acquired Powerset a search engine that uses semantics to provide more meaningful search results as compared to Google search that is based upon keywords.

The video provides an overview of Powerset search:


Powerset Demo Video from officialpowerset on Vimeo.

It would be very interesting to see how semantic search improves the search results. So far semantic web also known as web 3.0 is still in research laboratories. Search being such a basic function on the web will draw many users to it if it succeeds in providing better results.

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