Has MSN's time come?

...mindshare from developers. Indeed, Google even managed to snag some top employees away from Microsoft, a trick Microsoft performed on its rivals countless times in the 1980s and '90s.

The MSN shift also brings full circle an argument that began inside Microsoft a decade ago: If the Web, not the PC, is indeed the next computing platform, should Microsoft embrace it wholeheartedly, or do everything in its power to ensure that Windows stays at the centre of the computing universe?

A group of pro-Internet "doves" led by then-executive Brad Silverberg and Slivka argued in the mid-1990s that instead of digging in on the PC, Microsoft should beat its rivals by becoming the dominant platform for Internet computing, according to the book Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future of Microsoft,  by David Bank.

Ultimately, executives such as Allchin won that internal debate. The Internet Explorer browser was folded into Windows; a separate unit dedicated to Web development tools was merged with other product groups; and nearly all of Microsoft's Web technology development was tied to the Windows platform.

It's hard to say, given what happened in the following years, that it was a bad decision. A badly bruised Netscape was acquired by America Online. AOL, back then a major threat, lost its importance. And from fiscal 1997 to the end of fiscal 2005 in June, Microsoft's annual revenues grew from $11.36bn to $39.79bn. Profits nearly tripled to $12.25bn annually.

What those executives couldn't have seen back in 1997, however, was that a search engine recently developed by graduate students in a Stanford University dorm room would by 2005 become Google, a Net powerhouse on its way to doing better than $4bn per year in business.

"Microsoft is facing a whole new slew of competitors in the twenty-first century that weren't around five to 10 years ago," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research.

Today, Google is taking a page from the Microsoft playbook for tech dominance. It's wooing the third-party software developers who for years have written their programs for Windows — and increasingly are writing them to run on Google's Internet network. It's also luring some of Microsoft's top minds, including Kai-Fu Lee, an expert in speech recognition technology, and Adam Bosworth, a former Microsoft programmer extraordinaire who came to Google by way of BEA.

Microsoft, it seems, is faced with a classic "innovator's dilemma", as author Clayton Christensen put it in his groundbreaking book that defined why tech giants usually miss...

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