The Arms Race in the Search War

BuyGoogle.com has an interesting post on the "battle of giants" in the search field which increasingly looks like Google vs. Microsoft, with Yahoo left to decide which camp it should join:

"In short, Google has a huge head start. If Google keeps going fast, Microsoft can't catch up just by spending a lot of money.

For smaller competitors like Yahoo, eBay and Amazon, it's increasingly clear that none of them has the resources to participate in this arms race. For them, consolidation is coming."

Microsoft just announced that it will be spending $2 billion to build their own version of Google "cluster", the massive server farms that Google employs. To investors that meant: "we are hopelessly behind" and the MSFT stock took a 12% nose dive...


Image source: BuyGoogle.com

References:
'Management à la Google' — by Gary Hamel, WSJ. Bookofjoe.com.
Microsoft, Return of The Beast. GigaOm.com.