More reasons on why Microsoft will lose to Google

Excellent article in the Inquirer, Microsoft will lose to Google, mostly about Microsoft's not having any friends to help it out.

I believe though, that WHY it will lose, is rather because as a corporation, it has no understanding of the new world centered around web applications and content. After decades of making operating systems, platforms, etc. and failing to make it work easily, the old technophobes, who always envied computer-wielding technophiles but never could hold a candle to them, have embraced a version of computer tech so insulated from the hardcore tech - it's called the Internet New Media. With the Internet New Media, the old technophobes have become the new net-savvy generation, along with some of the technophiles too.

The irony is that the Internet Media has little to do with Tech from the perspective of the user. It's all about content and the presentation and collation and distribution of the same. The ever overflowing babbling of all the inhabitants of cyberspace, the dribble from the forummers, the rapid fire posts of the demagogues ... coming to us all in emails, forum posts, XML/RSS feeds, mailing lists, blogsites, newsfeeds, Google search results, customized home pages, you name it.

And Microsoft has spent the last few decades making us tools to make this content. Nothing to do with the actual content - the closest its Office Suite has come to content presentation and manipulation is probably the Excel pivot-table - the irrelevance of which to the internet is beyond the scope of discussion here.

So Microsoft is in a different business, a dying business. The new webapps are easy to use, meaningful to use and, as in the case of my sudden blogging, INSPIRING TO USE. Does Microsoft know? Sure, some rocket scientists inside surely KNOW THIS, even better than me. But what of the thousands of employees it has, in the USA, in Singapore, in any of its offices in the world, who spend their days pushing papers, making presentations, forwarding emails, watching their stocks perform on http://finance.google.com and basically, doing all that is banal and less of what humans do best - think. It's not that they can't, but in any corporation not geared to think, any corporation which doesn't put Creativity on a pedestal to pray to, the default setting ensures a prohibition on independent thought.

Can Microsoft start to put Creativity on the prayer altar? After decades of making and refining decades old concepts like word processors and spreadsheets, I'll wager NO as the answer.

Microsoft will lose. But not to Google, just to itself.

Since technophobes have WAY outnumbered technophiles