Redmond Won't Be Google's Waterloo

Let's suppose Microsoft actually can take some share with its integrated search. It's possible, but online advertising is a secular growth market, and with the destruction of many traditional media formats, it will get only bigger and bigger. So it's a slowdown in ad-market growth that will hurt Google, not Microsoft. Market share may shift, but the pie keeps getting bigger and that is the important factor for Google.

Finally, the key issue here is that Google is a moving target. Microsoft can battle Sony(SNE Quote) in video games because it is targeting a specific product. When I first started using Google in the late 1990s, there was no Froogle, no Blogger, and certainly no Desktop Search.

By the time we see Vista, I am willing to bet that Google will be a vastly different company than it is today, and Microsoft will still be chasing it, not the other way around.

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