Continued:

Consider this – the biggest charge leveled against Microsoft is that rather than innovating, it buys out startups and established firms. Well, Google bought out Picasa, Blogger, Android, Keyhole Corp. and probably some more that I have probably missed. Since it was Google doing the buying and since the search giant can do nothing wrong, majority of the industry pundits didn’t raise many questions, if any. No one questions innovations at Google because they have so far been able to maintain a certain informality and spunk in their communications to the world either by a press release or via new products it launches on a never ending schedule. Of course, a lot of the domains that Google enters, its products are much better than the competition, but recalling history, products just aren’t the point.

In the 1990s, IBM was considered as the gentle giant while Microsoft was the new brash kid on the block, a fast rising company that thought and more importantly believed that it could get into pretty much what it wanted and stamp out the competition no matter what its head start. Today, the same rests true with Google. It feels and believes that it can get into whatever catches it’s fancy and can beat everyone else while it’s at it.

Part of this confidence comes from the infrastructure it has built up. Consider Google Talk. Similar products have been around forever, but because Google came out with its own version, immediate thought was that the next step would be VoIP, perhaps even mobile telephony. Since we are talking about Google, there will soon be no Cingular or Verizon. Sure they are massive companies but hey, by the time Google is ready for the product to come out of Beta, it will be big enough to buy anyone it fancies. It’s not particularly small now, sitting on about $7 billion in cash.

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