Lines Finally Drawn in the Tech Wars

Interestingly, that's the very point Henry Blodget makes today at Silicon Alley Insider. Yesterday, Microsoft raised a few eyebrows when it claimed that Bing had already boosted its share of the search market by two percentage points, to weigh in with 11 percent of the market. But with a recent survey by JPMorgan in hand, Blodget argues that this is as good as it will ever get for Microsoft. The problem, he argues, is that people think search works fine the way it is and don't regard it as fundamentally broken. Microsoft may pull a few people from AOL and Ask, and a few more may drop in to check out Bing's bells and whistles. But the JPMorgan survey indicates that at least 62 percent of respondents said they had no problem with the way they search on the Internet now, and as long as they feel satisfied, they'll continue to use the service they always have—i.e., Google.

And that's the same point that Blodget's colleague Dan Frommer makes about Microsoft's natural advantage: software. Now that Microsoft has offered free Web-based office software, people will stick with what they know. "Assuming they aren't a complete disaster, and offer some better features—and better compatibility with offline Office—than Google Docs, they should quickly take over the little ground Google has gained on Microsoft Office's cash cow," he writes.

So for the next few years, Google and Microsoft will spend billions of dollars battling for supremacy all over the Web. But they may well find that once the money's spent and the rivers are choked with their dead, they're each right back where they started.