I’m sure others noticed that the NY Times ran very similar, except polar opposite stories on Sunday and Monday. The two articles are Google Gets Ready to Rumble with Microsoft by Steve Lohr and Miguel Helft and Faster Chips are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust by John Markoff.

Here is the summary. The former article describes a behavior change where people trust their high speed internet connection to log into a data center located somewhere else in the world (probably load balanced to multiple sites around the world). The latter article describes CPU chips becoming faster and more efficient in their processing. Every personal computer whether it is a Mac, a Dell, or a cell phone has one. Microsoft makes a lot of money on the operating system (OS); the software that organizes and instructs the hardware (chips) from an end user perspective.

Here is why they are polar opposites. Google can store specialized OS like software in a data center that is very cheap for the end user to access. Google, as noted in the article, have reduced the cost of their data center down beyond what anyone else can. The specialized OS like software is based on something called FOSS or Free and Open Source Software. This means it doesn’t cost too much to sell because no one person really owns it. So as long as you have a high speed connection and acceptable end user hardware, you can compute really cheaply and easily. Microsoft is banking on ever increasing power and decreasing cost of CPU chips. If they continue on their paths, it doesn’t motivate the masses to switch off their current behavior. The result is that Microsoft writes an OS to utilize the chip power and software programs to reside on the hardware the end user has. No high speed internet connection is needed. They can also charge more for their product because the end user wants to “own” the software and what I mean is that they want it installed on their local machine.

My prediction is that the average computer user will continue to purchase Microsoft based products. Microsoft will lower its prices to ensure this. But niches will move to cloud computing. And it won’t come just from Google. Amazon, Yahoo, EDS, and others will offer services to the niches i.e. small businesses, schools, and foundations. I also see cell phones and cloud computing partnering in a major way to offer addictive services such as proximity network gaming. The upshot of all this is the end user will benefit tremendously - both in cost and usability.