In a story on Microsoft, Steve Lohr describes an interesting anecdote:
The familiar pattern of a decade ago begs the question that Bill Gates was asked when he met last month with a group of executives and journalists from The New York Times: Will you do to Google what you did to Netscape?
Mr. Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and chairman, paused, looked down at his folded hands and smiled broadly, as if enjoying a private joke. “Nah,” he replied, “we’ll do something different.”
I am definitely one of those waiting to see the moves. So far, including the one of hiring Ray Ozzie (the story above) has not resulted in any thing really impressive.
That’s certainly an interesting reaction. I certainly think that 2006 is going to have a showdown between MSN, Google and Yahoo for the search engine market and there is a whole different list for the VoIP industry. Certainly interesting times.