(Column) - This one will go down as one of the most hard fought battles in Silicon Valley, harder than perhaps the bitter struggle between Apple and Microsoft when they were fighting over the various bits of information that Microsoft ‘copied’ from the Mac OS.

Despite everything that Apple and Steve Jobs tried, they clearly didn’t depict the kind of ruthlessness and shrewdness that Bill Gates and Microsoft did. As a result: Round 1, 2… and all went to Microsoft (well most of it anyway).

This time, however, the odds are not entirely in Microsoft’s favor (odds don’t mean public opinion, to be honest). Google has a comparatively shrewd, even if age old, strategy in place: If we both have a common enemy, then we are both on the same side. I am of course talking about Sun, and now IBM. They both detest Microsoft (Sun for obvious reasons and IBM because what Google is to Microsoft today, Microsoft was to IBM in the olden days), so it makes sense for the companies in question to form partnerships in order to tackle Microsoft hard.

I speculated Google’s attempt at creating a web based word processor just a few days before it was actually in the news. Sure, Google denied it, but what did we expect it to say?

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