Sure they will innovate just as Google innovates and comes out with it's products/services.
It is very much possible that MSFT could just be an invisible hand at providing the foundations for Google applications and any of the many plethora of applications that rely on that underlying foundation. After all it is not easy to develop an OS that is everything to everybody.
Damn I sound like Im evangelizing for MSFT and I am not.
Most people who own computers are not aware of who is the motherboard manufaturer or the disk drive manufacturer yet without those crucial pieces there wont be a system to work on top of. It is possible MSFT maybe come a curcial component and be doing it quietly.
Will they becontent to be flying low and under the radar while making a sizeable profit is to be seen doubt Balmer and company can get away from being always  in the spot light.

Ray Ozzie has a vision that is trying to leverage what MSFT has and that basically shackles them as most of MSFT's product portfolio is bloated and requires greater resources to sustain them while the products that Google and others are betting on are not shackled to the legacy environs of an MSFT and can create products/services that work with fewer resources.

I did a 2 year project for MSFT involving Embedded systems and Real Time Operating Systems and at the end of the study they were forced to realize their product portfolio just did not cut it to be able to take a small percentage even out of the single largest buyer of such products.
I believe they realize it overall across the company but they like many others are stuck and cant seem to extricate themselves,
TIme will tell.

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 11:25 AM, soulsonic <[address removed]> wrote:

It is not a matter of Google putting Microsoft out of business. The issue here is that Google and Microsoft overlap in the products they offer and therefore big parts of their revenue streams are interlocked within the same market. Much like Netscape was a big threat to Microsoft in the past, and the giant focused a lot of its resources to battle it, Google has emerged to be a threat today. They are gaining market share and brand recognition by continually delivering innovation and dominating web space. Something Microsoft is now aggressively striving to counteract with the hire of Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Live suite, and their efforts to create online office suite. If Google becomes a clear victor online, and keeps gaining market share, this alone poses a viable threat to Microsofts profits, and who is to say that they will stop there? They could enter the OS market in the future and become a more direct threat. Microsoft certainly has the upper hand today, but it needs to keep innovating to maintain it (or start innovating depending on how you want to look at it :)

 

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 1:59 AM, Baba <[address removed]> wrote:

Why should Google develop any position to threaten MSFT. How bout think that both can coexist and deliver shareholder value.
I just don't get this notion that somehow one has to conquer and destroy another to sustain their business objectives. I would guess that for all that Google is doing or will be doing it is definitely not making a Operating System, and the notion that somehow people will buy a computer without an OS or someone will install a Linux OS and install all the browser based applications for the Lowest Common Denominator ( the folks who don't know how turn on a machine at times) is wishful thinking. Maybe it will happen to 10% of so of the worldwide computers that will get deployed in the next 3 years.
So despite Firefox being available for ages or Linux being available to be deployed etc people have not transitioned into these platforms and they don't have a clue how to do such things.
What Google does maybe something MSFT spends time analyzing but I doubt that they are thinking of how to compete with a Google more likely they are seeing how they can continue to build their OS offering despite all the crap they have subjected the masses to through the varius snafus.
When I look at MSFt I do reallythink most of us are Massochistic as we tolerate the pain inflicted and keep going back for more... Google has money to sustain itself...

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