July 07, 2011, 4:49 PM — If you wanted to attack Microsoft, Google, or Apple, and snack on their revenue and market shares in various segments, you'd want to attack the core of their business, the venerable oil-wells-in their-basements. An organization's war chest, along with their mercenary armies of advocates, comprises an organization's ability to do economic business battle. The recent aligning of Facebook with Microsoft is more than result of the old aphorism that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." It's a major chess piece moved.
Social stuff isn't really new, but its successful adoption across the planet is. Facebook and Twitter have captured the flag for the moment. There's a realignment of forces that wants to snack on our ostensible new desire to throw privacy out the window, and communicate with each other via various interactive methods. Doing so has created great ripples in the foundation of computing, and its newest empires are girding up for a multi-dimensional war. At stake are the components we'll adopt over the next decade.
Microsoft’s oil-wells-in-the-basement are comprised of operating systems revenue, Microsoft Office, gaming hardware and software, developer-certification-education programs, and online services—including ad revenues. The core businesses require ongoing investment, but much capital has been sunken into drilling the oil wells. The Windows franchise has pumped scandalous amounts of oil.
By contrast, Google’s basement oil well is its search-advertising revenue. In interesting ways, it attacks almost all of Microsoft’s oil wells through the use of cloud applications. Eric Schmidt, whose tenures at direct Microsoft competitors Sun Microsystems, Novell, and Apple’s board of directors, understands Microsoft’s oil business very thoroughly.
Google poises some of its many armies thusly:
| Google Product | Attacks Microsoft Product |
|---|---|
| Android on Smartphones and Tablets | Windows low-end operating systems; Windows Mobile Products |
| Google Apps | Office Desktop products; countered with Microsoft Office 365 |
| Google + | Any hope Microsoft had with social networking; countered by the Facebook-Microsoft Skype video deal |
| Gmail | Outlook, and the entire Microsoft Exchange franchise |
| Google Voice | (now Microsoft) Skype |
| Google Search and AdWords | Bing, augmented somewhat by the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal |
| Google + Photos (Picasa) | Windows Live Photo Gallery |
| YouTube | No Equivalent |
| Google Talk | MSN – Windows Live Chat |
As can be seen, the war poised by Google has many fronts, but interestingly, several are missing. There are no server operating systems under attack in the chart, but Microsoft's server businesses is being attacked by the IaaS cloud model, and to a lesser extent, the PaaS models of cloud infrastructure. Microsoft's rigid licensing is starting to melt, and when Azure’s VM Roles become available, the Microsoft licensing models for server will have been moderately upended.
For its part, Microsoft is fighting back. To prevent customer drift, it's providing discounts for clients that are moving traditionally desktop-based applications to the cloud.
Microsoft is also extracting its ounce of blood from Android vendors that are snacking on its miserable Windows Mobile success.
[ Hijacking Android, one manufacturer at a time ]
Microsoft's alignment with Facebook joins veteran general Steve Ballmer with young Napoleon Mark Zuckerberg to fight the long enemy of the Microsoft empire, The Three Musketeers of Google, Brin, Page, and Schmidt.
Missing from the battle are the periphery peoples: Linux and FOSS adherents that ought to be screaming bloody murder and war crimes against Microsoft's assertion of a tax on Android (a FOSS Linux derivative). On another front, the Kingdom of Oracle has fired litigation shells amidships against Google. Oracle's oil well, database technology, was battled by Sun Microsystems, which was conveniently purchased to battle Google, HP and IBM, and to a lesser extent, Microsoft. Strangely, Oracle doesn't have many bulletholes or ricochets in their armor from Google. One wonders why they're intent on firing grenades made of US Federal Court filings at Google. Perhaps the smell of success over Android is just too overwhelming.
Other MIA include civilian users, largely unaware of the extent of the wars and various fronts behind the scenes. They vote with +1s, a little money here and there, and a lot of pageviews. Certainly the US government, who has jurisdiction and ostensible leadership in important areas of the economy, has been totally silent, choosing instead to lob munitions at Libya in a different economic war.
