Monitortan

Hype notwithstanding, Google is not going to take over the world. Not even close. Most of their non-search offerings have been only modestly successful, it seems.

I'm not surprised. For years, I was mystified by the insistence of some Microsoft critics that the company's dominance in desktop operating systems and office software would lead to total Microsoft domination of every software market. Some of these people may say that it was only the antitrust case that kept this from happening. But I think it's obvious that a totally Microsoft-dominated world was never going to happen.

There are a number of reasons for this, but the most obvious is good old human nature. Businesses began to diversify their software buys, partly because they just didn't want to be totally beholden to any one company. No way were they going to let Microsoft become as dominant in, say, databases as they were in OSes.

Same thing's happening to Google. Just yesterday, I blogged about my refusal to use Google's new payment service. Why? Because it's from Google. They want to create an all-Google world. But that's not where I want to live. Me, or anybody else.