Where is Google headed?

Over the last few weeks we have seen quite a lot written about Google and Microsoft.

Google Eath Vs MSN Virtual Earth
Google Homepage vs MSN Start Page

Google and Microsoft seem to have their own views of the internet world of tomorrow.

While Microsoft has been consolidating its position in the PC market by bundling a variety of information organisation/management tools along with its OS making the entire package extremely attractive, Google seems to have its own plans for tomorrow.

Google’s mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. And in keeping with its mission statement it has been coming out with applications that do just that and have been providing these for free. For every application that MS bundles along with its OS, Google seems to have on offer an application that does exactly that for absolutely free.

In doing so, Google is gradually sucking the life out of the Microsoft OS. What it aims to leave behind is just an OS that manages the hardware. With all other services being made available for free by Google and others like Yahoo, Mozilla etc, MS would find it difficult to make the entire package look like an attractive proposition.

Robert Young in a guest post on Om Maliks blog GigaOm, explains in detail what he thinks is Google's Strategy to make Microsoft obsolete.

Jason Kottke in his blog talks about OS Mutations that are likely to happen in the near future.

He talks about an OS based on the Web which he refers to as WebOS.
The System would have 3 main parts

1. A Browser
2. Web Applications and
3. A local Web Server : which would serve content from the local machine to the browser.

So apart from the web browser and the web server, all applications will be coded for the WebOS and not for any specific OS like Windows or Linux.

With Yahoo's acquisition of konfabulator and Google's release of its Desktop Search, we certainly seem to be heading in this direction!!!