The Showdown in Silicon Valley

First of all, I want to express my deep condolences and shock for the victims and the families of the victims of yesterday's earthquake. There are no words in English to express remorse for the loss of more than 13,000 lives in one day, but if you're Christian I ask that you pray for them.

Onto the story of the day: Microsoft is challenging Google's chokehold on search engines! For many of you, this is old news. However, I found a really interesting article here about it. It's a long article, but that one page really exposes the meat of what they're trying to say.

If you scroll down to the bottom of that page you can see a timeline of companies that have stood up to Microsoft and been devoured, which is quite disheartening. I myself do not foster an avid hatred of Microsoft because I think that Bill Gates started out with an honest dream and he began with some incredible stuff like BASIC. However, I think somewhere down the line he lost sight of that and has become power hungry. I guess it makes sense to have so much ambition with so much money to back it, but I just really hope that Google wins this fight. Gates dropped out of college, but the guys who run Google either have PhDs or are in their doctoral program currently to be doctors of Computer Science from schools like Berkely! Maybe you don't need a fancy degree to be successful in programing, but to have the passion to do that really amazes and impresses me.

Can they beat M$? Possibly. The problem that the article points out is that the search engine world is so young that there still aren't standards, so if Google got its foot in the door there it would do just fine. But we're all familiar with Microsoft's cutthroat tactics, and that's what worries me. Google should be familiar with them though from seeing what IE did to Netscape and hopefully they'll persevere because I think Google is a nice, honest company with just great principles backing them up. Their employees get paid time to come up with their own little projects! They really encourage innovation and I think I'd like to intern there someday, but then I couldn't work for Microsoft! Oh well, good riddens.

Oh, and I wish that high video game sales were reflected in the salaries of video game programmers :( That'd be such a fun job! I'm not surprised that sales went up so much because my uncle tried to buy a PS2 early last week and no store in Houston, and even many big online retailers, had it in stock!