I spend more time writing on forums than on this blog, so I’m going to start sharing the more interesting threads I participate in here as well.

WebDesignofMaine: Google is number 1. I think Google is going to take over the world. Think about where we are as a civilization, the information age, and who ever can controls that information will have a lot of power. Wikipedia is a major contender since it’s more of any organized database of information than Google. But Google is striving for domination by developing so many tools that you won’t need to use any other service, and how much does it cost again? Oh it’s free right now. Microsoft will put up a struggle with it’s massive amount of assets, but seriously, who likes them anymore?

Google has text search. That’s it. They’re not going to take over the world, and they’re probably not even going to be how you find things in 10 years. We don’t go online with the goal of reading lists of links. That is just how we find things in this tiny slice of time until there’s a better way of identifying information.

There’s a much better chance of Microsoft being around and being involved in that new way of doing things in 10 years than Google, whose ability to innovate and acquire relies on its sole source of income… text ads, another market that won’t exist in this form in a decade.

Liking a company has little to do with whether that company can innovate. To put this in perspective, I think Microsoft hired more new employees last year (adding to its nearly 70,000 pool) than Google has in total. Put enough smart people together and you have some huge potential.

And if you contend it’s all about the information, and that Google somehow has more of it or more control over it, that could end overnight. In 2-3 years, Vista will inevitably supplant XP as the most common operating system in the home, simply through the hardware upgrade cycle. Vista puts search boxes on the start menu and every explorer window. The reason Google’s been grasping at any straw it can to have this classified as monopolistic by the DOJ (unsuccessfully) is that if Microsoft turns on web search from all these boxes, users aren’t going to have a reason to use a search engine. Why open a webpage when you can just type right onto the desktop and have Live.com search respond? Of course, like Internet Explorer, the default search engine could always be changed, but as MSN’s web usage share shows, most people don’t change their default homepage, let alone buried settings.

Like it or not, Google will need to successfully enter new markets and really innovate past text searching, which they haven’t yet shown the ability to do, if they want to be around very long. I too wish I had bought some stock during the IPO, but I would definitely sell it in the next year or two.