Strategy Game : Apple , Microsoft and Google

For anybody who is interested in corporate strategy these are real feast time. The strategic wars waged by the technology heavy weights is seeming to get intense day by day. MS is really flexing its muscles agaisnt the Google to break its monopoly in the search with the Bing. Though Bing is not a path breaking revolution it neatly aligns to the MS style of adopting to the best working model and perfecting it. Down the line Bing could prove nuisance to Google if not as an outright killer.

Google, while preparing to adapt to Bing's onslaught wanted to drag the war to a different war and announced Chrome OS. While Chrome OS itself is not an ingenious invention (would be based on linux kernal) google is just trying to open up another battle to distract Microsoft. This may force microsoft to release a lite version of either XP or 7 to counter the Chrome Offense (if it really an offence) as MS thrives on it OS dominance.

While the analysts and industry pundits were discussing the Chrome, Bing etc Microsoft has entered into a deal with Yahoo to further intense the onslaught on Google. It is going to be interesting to see how google react and retain its dominance on the search engine (and ultimately ad revenue battle) field with the fight intensifying from different corners of the world , especially from baidu which could eat away a major portion of chinese, japanese and far-eastern market.

When MS, Yahoo and Google are fighting the known battles, Apple is on the verge of releasing its iTablet(?) which is hoped to be another revolutionary breakthrough in the content publishing world (people could buy few chapters of the book, instead of the whole book). If the tablet lives up to its hype , world is pretty sure that it will, then amazon would be dragged to a bigger fight for dominance in distrubution of the content which more or less it dominates now through amazon book store.

Of all the games played by MS and Google , the most interesting game would be that of Apple. Apple creates a market, retains its dominance for a longer time with its own supply chain (iTunes) for distribution and makes another innovation before the current product loses its charm or the space is crowded by copy cats(iPod, iPhone etc) . If Apple adopts a right pricing (very likely) for the iTablet, it could crack open a new avenue for its much awaited growth into the OS domination.

Anyways, we are going to have plenty of actions these days and it is going to be throughly entertaining.