Remember When…Google was the Anti-Microsoft

This week, Facebook launched a new email service. It has long been in the works as Project Titan. While perhaps not a direct threat against Google, it is certainly an attack on Gmail.

Remember back to the good old days…when we walked uphill to school in the snow both ways, when children actually played baseball (and not the video game version), when information was delivered with ink and paper, when cell phones were the size of our heads…

This week, Facebook launched a new email service. It has long been in the works as Project Titan. While perhaps not a direct threat against Google, it is certainly an attack on Gmail.

…err I digress, remember when Google was the white knight against Microsoft. We wanted to use Netscape just to make Microsoft mad, but IE was just better. Ah, yes the good old days and the turn of the century. Was it really just in 2000 when they signed the pact with Yahoo to make them the default search engine? A mere decade it took them to go from White Knight to feared Big Brother. It took Apple 26 years to go from 1984 to being mocked by Futurama with its Eyephone or from having their great anti-Microsoft ad campaign spoofed by TMobile in Piggyback.

Has Google really done this in less than 10 years? We will soon see. Earlier this month Google found itself in a little hot water over their StreetView cars that were driving around picking geographically based personal information. I understand that personal privacy may be dead, but I would venture a bet that if there is a backlash it will be aimed squarely at Google (and ironically in this case Facebook).

Clearly not all markets move at breakneck speed, but it does tell a story of thinking about tomorrow in a more methodology approach.