Only a few days ago Google announced its new operating system, entering into Microsoft’s zone of dominance, and yesterday Microsoft and Yahoo announced their new long-term partnership aimed at breaking Google’s dominance in Search.
Competition is good for consumers – right? Well, I believe it is good to have several significant players compete. It certainly fosters innovation and keeps prices at bay. However, these latest “head-to-head” competitive moves between the two giants also highlights the insatiable apetite for money and power, which ultimately drives both Microsoft and Google.
An article (in Hebrew) by Ami Marbuka, Computer Science lecturer at Bar-Ilan University, was published today in Israel’s The Marker. The article warns readers that Google will eventually place a price tag on many of the free services it provides today. The article cites the example of Yahoo’s free web hosting initiative, Geocities, which Yahoo significantly improved over time only to announce several weeks ago that it is replacing it in October 2009 with a paid service. Google’s strategy, according the the article, is to get us all so “hooked” onto its services that we will have no viable option but to pay the eventual price tag once it is introduced.
My take is that whether or not Google plans for things to develop this way, someone other than Google’s investors will eventually have to pay for it’s continued introduction and enhancement of free services.
The opening of new fronts in the war of the giants can only mean one thing: the day on which we’ll all have to pay is sooner than we thought.
