Google and Microsoft Need Each Other

Google and Microsoft are fierce competitors. Everyone knows that.

Google is out to eat Microsoft’s lunch, steal its Office revenue by putting applications online. Microsoft is out to eat Google’s lunch, putting Office online, and continuing to grow its own search business.

But these two companies need one another right now. Badly. They need to ally. Now.

The reason for that is power. Political power. Microsoft, Google, Apple and every other tech company is being locked-out of the wireless market by AT&T and Verizon. Those two companies are working hard to extend the same control they exert on wireless to the Internet.

If they win the "net neutrality" fight, the Bell monopolists, who also control most of the Internet backbone,  will do just that. Already, AT&T and Verizon are hoarding bandwidth which Google, Microsoft, Apple and the rest could use to make a ton of money — far more money than AT&T or Verizon could ever make with it. They’re defining huge swaths of their bandwidth as off-limits, defining it as "services" — video services and phone services which could easily ride on the Internet instead, and would give people dirt-cheap voice service and infinite video choices.

AT&T and Verizon are standing there with a bandwidth hose and kinking it, just like you’d kink a garden hose, so only a trickle of bandwidth comes out to the market. Then they’re charging all of us out the wazoo for that trickle, because we need it, because we don’t have any choice. It’s digital water — AT&T and Verizon have a monopoly on digital water.

AT&T has already posted new "terms of service" which forbid business customers from even criticizing the company. It’s reminiscent of the worst Microsoft abuses from back in the day, but everyone can choose another operating system, a Mac or Linux. Most businesses can’t choose another phone company — they’re captives.

Already AT&T is working hard, in Washington, to restrict Google,
first through claiming their acquisition of DoubleClick gives them a
"monopoly" on Internet advertising, then through getting permission to
shake the company down for allowing it access to "its" customers.

It Microsoft were in Google’s position, AT&T would come after them. Same with Apple. Same with Sun.

Right now AT&T is actually worth more than Google — its market cap is $258 billion, against Google’s $182 billion. AT&T has more lobbyists, and more scumbags
Astroturfing for them than you can shake a stick at. And AT&T
fights dirty — dirtier than Karl Rove ever dreamt of fighting.

But look. Microsoft is worth $279 billion — a lot more than AT&T. And Verizon, AT&T’s tag-team partner, is worth $131 billion — a lot less than Google. Add in Apple’s $138 billion and a other assorted door prizes
and there’s plenty of financial heft to take on the monopolists
anywhere — on Wall Street, in Washington, on the teevee — anywhere.

But you have to unite for that to happen. Benjamin Franklin said it best, speaking of another tyrant. "We must hang together, gentlemen…else, we shall most assuredly hang separately." (The cartoon above was his creation. Good polemicist, that Franklin.)

True then, true now. We need open markets. The
opening of the software market by Linux and Apple is the best thing
that ever happened to Microsoft — it’s made the company more limber,
more nimble, stronger. The same must happen to the mobile market, for
all our sakes. And the same with the Internet market.

For technology to thrive, it must be free to
compete, and to spread the wealth of Moore’s Law to all our people. I
think your friends at Intel would agree with you — you know they’re
worth $155 billion?

Separately, the Bells will kill the techs, and kill our economy with them. Together, I think Franklin would like the odds. I know I do.