Google and Microsoft jostle for desktop position
Published: 24 May 2004 10:50 BST
The Microsoft factor
But desktop file search poses vastly different problems from Web search, and the company could easily be trumped by operating system makers such as Microsoft, whose Windows software runs on more than 90 percent of the world's PCs.
Microsoft's OS dominance has been credited in the past with helping the software giant muscle into fresh territory by bundling new features in Windows -- a key allegation the US Department of Justice's antitrust suit, filed against the company in October 1997.
In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing announcing its IPO, Google flagged potential Microsoft tactics as a possible threat to its business on the Web. In an overview of risk factors facing the company, Google speculated that the software giant could one day seek to interfere with its ability to index certain kinds of documents on the Web.
Such concerns are even more pertinent when it comes to the desktop, where Microsoft holds powerful levers to promote its own products over those of rivals.
According to a report in The New York Times, Google will try to fulfil an unmet need among PC users for tools to easily find information across multiple applications on the hard drive -- searching through email, text documents in various formats, music, and photos files, for example. Consumers are likely to be the primary audience for such a tool, but it could easily infiltrate workplaces, too.
Apple Computer already offers an elegant tool built into Mac OS X to perform many of these tasks, but it only works on its own Macintosh line of computers, which account for less than 5 percent of the market. Although Microsoft includes desktop search software as part of Windows, it is unwieldy, and most users rely instead on self-managed file folders to organise their archives.
Microsoft is working on updating the next version of Windows -- Longhorn -- to allow people to search text, files and the Web within many applications. However, that version isn't slated for release until after 2006.
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