Microsoft vs. Google

Ina Fried of ZDNet wrote about Microsoft’s atti­tude towards Google. Ray Ozzie, the company’s Chief Soft­ware Archi­tect, noted that Microsoft is try­ing to catch up to Google in sev­eral areas, such as search engine usabil­ity and adver­tis­ing sales. As usual, Microsoft is buy­ing small, inno­v­a­tive firms and rolling their prod­ucts and ser­vices into Microsoft’s value chain and offerings.

My IS 7010 stu­dents should note Ozzie’s com­ments regard­ing a strate­gic inflec­tion point. It’s quite typ­i­cal for CXOs to use hind­sight to find a SIP that they should have iden­ti­fied as it hap­pened. Grove’s com­ments in our text­book are excel­lent in that regard, and they are highly rec­om­mended reading.

Tagged as: competitive-advantage, Google, inflection, Microsoft, point, sip, strategic, strategy, usability, value-chain