Nadella, Pichai rival companies in fight for global domination
June 29 of 2007 marked the first big series of maneuvres Apple began making against reigning computing giant of the time, Microsoft.
The iPhone’s launch blew ‘PC-era’ MS out of the water. Millions, impressed, with the iPhone and Apple’s iOS started moving towards the ‘Apple ecosystem’ — a bubble of innovation that promised seamless connectivity across various devices.
Today, the Cupertino-based giant sells iPads, iPods, laptops, iPhones etc. all on the promise that a single photo taken will appear in every single Apple device that the user owns. This is called ‘Cloud’, and it’s the next big tech pie.
Fast forward to 2015, Satya Nadella’s Microsoft is desperate to achieve a similar ecosystem. And standing in its plan to rule the world again is Google — with interests spread across search, operating systems and even laptops. It is the master of what’s described as the ‘internet economy’ — a world relying on internet access to generate both information and capital. Apple’s out of the race because let’s face it, it’s not the mass market player both Google and Miscrosoft aspire to be.
Nadella-run Microsoft’s push into search using Bing is scoring a few hits. In March of this year, MS said one in five computers was using Bing to search the Web. But future-thinking Nadella had made a big move last year — buying Nokia. The new Windows 10 OS is being seamlessly moved into mobile and customers are being promised a never-experienced-before bridge between Microsoft’s devices.
And mobile is where the future is. Last year, for the first time in history the number of smartphone owners exceeded the number of PC users. By 2017, an estimated 5.3 billion people would have gone mobile. A whopping 99.5 per cent of mobile users are using their devices to access information, 62.1 per cent use phones to check emails and 41.7 per cent download and use apps.
Both Microsoft and Google then want this internet economy pie. Microsoft under Nadella is getting leaner and faster and Google has on Tuesday, promoted one of its smartest internet-era generals to take the company into a new future — a massive war which will be fought on tiny handheld devices.
