Jason’s Life

Most people with a hint of a religious background have heard the story of David and Goliath. For those that haven’t, it is basically a story about how the small can defeat the big. There is undoubtedly a few morals to be learned from the story, but, the more interesting point it makes is that one should use their own inherit skills to accomplish a task, rather than the generally accepted approach.

In today’s corporate world, I feel like there is another David and Goliath story in the online war between Google and Microsoft. What I find so interesting are the methods in which Google is attempting to take on the corporate “Goliath”. Let’s go back four years and think about the situation; Microsoft had Windows XP rolled out and it was met with a lot of fanfare. If someone were to ask you who you thought Microsoft’s biggest opponent was, you might think of Apple, which was just starting a small come-back tour with the first version of OS/X. You might also think of linux which still had a long way to go in the desktop market (the esoteric might also mention BeOS, AmigaOS, Solaris, etc.). The point here is that pretty much everyone was thinking, how can any OS topple Windows from the throne?

Now let’s fast forward to today (which just happens to be Google’s 7th birthday). I think most people would agree that if there was ever going to be a “Microsoft-killer” it would be Google. But wait, Google doesn’t put out Operating Systems at all, so how could they possibly take down Microsoft? Well that’s where David and Goliath come in. Google isn’t fighting Microsoft on their turf at all, instead, Google is slowly and surely taking away the need for an operating system at all. Ever so slowly, people are clicking on the icon for their internet browser of choice over every other icon on the desktop. In fact, how many of you could probably get along just fine with nothing BUT an internet browser?

It makes you wonder about other things in life that could be solved with a different approach. Gasoline prices could be combated in the short term by having businesses adopt a _work from home_ type attitude. With today’s high-speed internet access, net meetings could easily take place and voice-over-ip could alleviate the business telephone costs. It certainly seems better than Bush’s approach to the problem by adding more US refineries. I found myself saving quite a bit of fuel just by taking the shorter (albeit slower) back roads over the expressway everyday.

I guess the point here is to think outside of the box. Something like world hunger might be easier to solve by teaching people how to farm rather than to send shipments of food over to them. Maize is one of the most adaptable plants in the world and can even be “used to create petrol”:http://www.safrica.info/ess_info/sa_glance/sustainable/ethanol-120905.htm to fuel vehicles (which helps out the first problem I mentioned). Guess we can kill two birds with one stone and it’s not like we don’t have the land to this ourselves. Did you know the government actually pays farmers to not plant crops on all their land (in Europe they call this “Set-Aside”)? The ideals for this program are based solely on economic reasons, however, it seems to me that if farmers suddenly got into the fuel business, money wouldn’t be a problem.

I think everyone has a tendency to get caught up with current “hype” and they forget that there’s more than one way to skin a -cat- … err … fish.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 27th, 2005 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.