The looming battle between Old Economy (Microsoft) and New Economy
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Google and Microsoft are duking it out for developers' hearts and minds.  But is Amazon the wild card?
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The growing confrontation between Google and Microsoft promises to be an epic business battle.
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GET READY FOR BROWSER WARS: THE Sequel. Six years after Microsoft Corp.&#39;s Internet Explorer defeated Netscape Navigator in the signature fight of the online age, a direct descendant of the pioneering
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SEATTLE/SAN FRANCISCO  - As Microsoft Corp.  MSFT.O prepares to launch its own Web search engine to take  on Google Inc. GOOG.O, industry watchers are already  speculating over which rival will be left standing in the  high-stakes competition.
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Microsoft proves, yet again, that it is stuck in the 20th Century.
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By Benjamin J. Romano, Seattle Times  Dec. 11--As Microsoft revs up the Windows Vista marketing engine, it's touting the economic boon the software is expected to bring to the rest of the technology industry.
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Rivals are stalking its consumer-electronics star, and history shows its strategy still has old weaknesses. But catching Jobs &amp; Co.
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In the battle between Apple and Microsoft, two men are in charge of competing efforts to ensure that the PCâs basic software stays relevant in a Web-centered world.
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It was a matter of minutes before news of Microsoftâs bid  jumped from front pages to the vibrant world of technology blogs.  Hereâs some of the more interesting thoughts so far.
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Itâs like the browser wars all over again: Two vendors are battling to win the hearts, minds, and debit cards of users and developers. The browser wars were really platform wars, based on the assumption that the browser would be the nexus through which users would access data inside and outside their companyâs walls. The battle hymn is sounding once more, only this time itâs a ring tone. Iâll get to the connection between the browser wars and the enterprise mobility race at the end.
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By Saul Hansell  There is a lot about the way Microsoft has run its Internet business that Steve Berkowitz wants to change. But he is finding it more difficult than he expected.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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Jorgen Thelin and Rebecca Dias detail Microsoft's Strategy for Web Services, specifications and products.
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GoogleÂs introduction this week of communications applications for enterprises has extended the software battle that has been brewing with Microsoft. And, according to analysts, it will likely prompt an aggressive response from Redmond.
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Ziff Davis - The competition between open-source and proprietary software promises to be the most significant force in IT over the next decade.
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An offensive against one of the last pockets of resistance to the proliferation of the personal computer into every corner of our lives will be launched this week by two high-tech giants, Microsoft and Intel.
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Opinion: Microsoft&#39;s global battles, such as its appeals hearing that&#39;s about to start in Luxembourg, should teach regulators that they need to address the company&#39;s behavior before it creates problems.