Google Marches On, Microsoft Responds

I'm going to completely avoid political comments in the run-up to the elections, except to say that if it were Google vs. Microsoft and I were a political analyst, I'd probably be saying: "Google's got the momentum, and they're changing the game faster than Microsoft can adopt to it. Google is doing what it wants, and Microsoft is marching to the tune of Google's drumbeat".

Microsoft has just announced that the next major version of Windows (if you track them sequentially through the broad consumer market, ignoring WIndows 1.0 and 2.0, then we have first Win3.0, second Win 3.1 and 3.11, third Chicago/Windows4/Windows95, 98, ME, fourth NT5.0/Windows2000, fifth XP, sixth Vista/WIndows 6.0, next Windows7 ) will be called Windows7, will be here real soon and it'll be much better than Vista. What this really means is - don't buy a computer before Christmas, or if you're a corporation don't buy new computers for your thousand desks, because something that might work better is coming soon. This seems like a bad way to run a business unless you're desperate.

Microsoft announced Tuesday that Office 14 (v11 was Office 2003, v12 was Office 2005, 13 was skipped due to triskaidecaphobia or the Vista botch) due on the street at some future date like late 2009, 2010 (not specified) will include lightweight web versions of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint - all the things that Google Apps presently offer. And Microsoft will let you store your data on the Cloud (just like- well, Google).

And Google won't get locked out of the web-based world if Microsoft plays tricks with Internet Explorer because Google has it's own browser now. I love it when a plan comes together.