BigShinyThing

Why is this interesting? Well, for a start it has significant implications for advertisers — after all, you can’t advertise in Windows, can you (although we suspect that Microsoft’s ‘Live’ offerings in the next version of Windows will be edging closer to that)? As ZDNet points out:

What better application could you think of to embed ads into than one that people use for budgeting and price comparisons?

Google will be watching carefully who uses Spreadsheet and what they use it for. Once the company has proved the application and gathered enough usage data, then it’ll launch an AdWords option for Spreadsheet and start to test its viability as a vehicle for contextual ads.

Then there was the rather prescient letter in The Economist a while back by a Mr Alan Tobey:

Google seems to be following the same line Ronald Reagan took with the Russians in the 1980s (“Is Google the new Microsoft?”, May 13th). Reagan speeded up the break-up of the Soviet Union by forcing it to spend beyond its means on weaponry to defend against perceived, but actually unreal, threats such as the Star Wars programme.

In much the same way, Google is throwing up many cheap-but-flashy initiatives that force Microsoft to spend huge sums in order to contain perceived, but probably illusory, market threats. Can we not anticipate the same outcome: the break-up of software’s acknowledged evil empire and the emergence of its captive technologies into the world of fair competition?

Let’s see.