The May 25th issue of The Economist magazine carried a letter to the editor by Alan Tobey from Berkeley, California which was in response to a special report that the same magazine carried in its May 13th issue titled — Is Google the new Microsoft?

Here’s the letter —

Google seems to be following the same line Ronald Reagan took with the Russians in the 1980s. Reagan speeded up the break-up of the Soviet Union by forcing it to spend beyond its means on weaponry to defend against perceived, but actually unreal, threats such as the Star Wars programme.

In much the same way, Google is throwing up many cheap-but-flashy initiatives that force Microsoft to spend huge sums in order to contain perceived, but probably illusory, market threats. Can we not anticipate the same outcome: the break-up of software’s acknowledged evil empire and the emergence of its captive technologies into the world of fair competition?

Wow! It’s just so true. Most of the new stuff being rolled out by Google started as “fun” projects that it encourages its employees to work on or were created by a small team of people.

However, whenever Google rolls our something, Microsoft announces that it is hiring 10-15,000 more people to create something similar. Most of the times Yahoo! also ends up spending a few million to make an acquisition.

This analogy that Alan made just makes so much sense.