Last week I noted that Google Apps now sync with Outlook Calendar, Contacts, and Mail and that Microsoft Office 2010 will have online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, thereby competing head-on with Google Apps.
Those are great examples of the benefits of competition between Microsoft and Google, and there are even more examples. Another really huge example is Microsoft’s relaunch of its search service as Bing. I have been using this as my default search engine for the past two weeks, and have only had to go to Google a few times to find what I was looking for. Bing is doing a really good job and some of the qualitative tests I have done suggest that it is improving almost daily.
And then there is a new product from Microsoft called BingTweets, which integrates Bing with a search of the real-time information stream from Twitter. Here is a snapshot that I took of it last week:
It’s a pretty neat service. Still in beta, but definitely offering some promise for integrating classic search and real-time search.There is a huge future in real-time search, and tying into Twitter makes a lot of sense. For example, I actually learned of Michael Jackson’s death via Twitter even before it was announced on CNN. Twitter is truly real-time and it is often possible to see trends developing in it before they show up in the more classic media.
Another good product that has come out of competition between Google and Microsoft is Google’s Chrome Browser. It is an extremely fast browser that renders web pages very well. The Windows version is pretty full-featured and is gaining market share: 5 percent of the people who visit Keener Living are using Chrome.
The Mac version is also starting to take shape. My main complaint with it is that it lacks a bookmarks manager:
Once Chrome for Mac has a bookmarks manager, I may just it make it my default browser.
Competition is great. Google Docs will get better because of Microsoft Office 2010, and Microsoft Office will get better because of Google Docs, and so on. And we are the beneficiaries.