Last month I had an idea for a post, came into the office, and found that TechCrunch beat me to it. Today the same thing happened. (I guess I’ll have to start working 16 hour days, 7 days a week, like Michael Arrington does.)

I was mulling over yesterday’s product announcements by Microsoft and Google in my mind last night. Microsoft’s was just so, well, Microsoftian: “Let’s trot out the next version of our search engine. We’ll call it a ‘Decision Engine’ and give it a spiffy name, but it’ll be basically the same old warmed-up leftovers. Kinda like how we do operating systems.”

Google’s announcement? It was real Googley: “Let’s change everything. We’ll create a comprehensive communication tool that combines all the things we use now, but are segmented or fragmented. It’ll be flexible. And open source, so it can grow in ways we haven’t thought of (yet).”

As I’m bouncing these ideas around in my head, my T-Mobile G1 buzzed and started to load its new firmware update, codenamed “Cupcake“. (I’m digging the on-screen “soft” keyboard and auto-rotation between portrait and landscape modes. My wife is wondering why the seemingly-normal man she married is now getting frothy-mouthed over a phone upgrade.) Anyway, Android, the phone’s operating system, is free and open source. Google gives it away for free to handset manufacturers.

Could these two companies be any more different in how they view the world?

To get back to this article’s narrative hook, Arrington beat me with a great post titled, “What Just Happened? Thursday Was Supposed To Be Bing Day.” The image at the top is a hoot, as is this gem:

“You know that scene in the Lord Of The Rings movie where the huge eye of Sauron on top of that mountain swings its view from the alliance troops massed at the Black Gate of Mordor over to the real action, Frodo with the Ring at the Cracks of Doom? That’s basically what happened today. The eyes of the world, and the press, swung from San Diego to San Francisco as they realized what was happening. And what was happening was this: Google stole Microsoft’s thunder with one of the most ambitious and exciting products the tech world has seen in a long while.”

Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
on May 29, 2009 - 9:30 am

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