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If the first post of the series had Microsoft dominating the traditional areas of computing, today we take a dive in to the Google dominated areas.  While Google has continued to innovate in search, email and IM service, even Microsoft has come up with some solid innovations in these areas.

So, We will start with Google,I mean Search.

Search : Bing is not Google, and that is the verdict. Even Bing realizes the same. While presenting Visual Search at TechCrunch 50, they did go on to say when the market leader is as far ahead as Google, there is no point competing. Trying to explore niche areas like visual search made more sense. A statement pretty similar in attitude to Google’s releasing their Chrome OS only for netbooks.

I just get to the right result by Googling it. There was a lot of hype when Microsoft struck a deal with Yahoo for providing their search results. The process is still on, but the result hasn’t exactly been the way Microsoft or Yahoo may have hoped it to be. While Google’s market share didn’t take a hit, it has been Yahoo’s market share which has been eaten into by Bing. Both Google and Bing have struck deals with Twitter to crawl status updates. Bing has already launched its Twitter search at http://www.bing.com/twitter but I have not been able to understand why I should use this instead of real time Twitter search at search.twitter.com . Google’s social search is also far from what we all expected it to be showing only the stuff written by your different friends.

Things to look out for in the near future:

• How Google and Bing include Twitter status updates in their search results?
• Bing is said to have stuck a deal with Facebook, and will hence be able to include Facebook status updates in it. There is a lot of information out there on Facebook.
• Once Yahoo search is powered by Bing, the market-share of Bing will take a big leap. Being on the Yahoo homepage will be a huge boost.
• Negative publicity like Rupert Mudroch not giving out news to Google (hilarious) and Microsoft (mentioned at most places as Bing trying to buy News) trying to trigger the same will not help Bing in any way.
• Realtime searches like OneRiot, SocialMention etc are doing a decent job as far as social media is concerned.

Overall, Google has a huge advantage in this sector,not only because of the results they churn out but also because of the goodwill they have earned. Also, innovation through the various Labs feature always keeps the users interested in Google.

EMail Service: It did not take long for Twitter to go overcapacity when Gmail services  went down for an hour this year. That is extent to which Gmail is being used by the casual email users.

All this and more, Gmail remains the fastest growing emailing service but in terms of market-share there is still some distance to cover.

Although, Gmail has some of the most amazing features thanks mainly to their lab features, but emails have been there for ages and Yahoo and AOL are difficult to replace. The fact that most computers run on Windows and Office dominates the document creation space helps Microsoft’s cause further. The fact that Gmail does go down every now and then has also made the corporates jittery about moving to Gmail. Giving out a package of standard google apps with 50 email IDs free is definitely helping Google’s cause.

Email is being challenged by a lot of technologies like Google very wave, the multiple social networks, threadsy and much more. But, I don’t think email is going to die that quickly. Google is trying to innovate its way into this space but the traditional giants still seem to hold strong.

IM Services: IM services have come a long way from IRC chats to the super hyped Google Wave. IM’s have evolves to VOIP’s where Skype leads the pack by a huge margin, owing to its brilliant quality. We couldn’t find any updated report on the market share of IM services, with most mailing services allowing chat within the browsers. There has been a lot of innovation in the IM services with Gmail even allowing a video chat within the browser. However, this traditional IM market seems to be still dominated by Microsoft, AOL etc.

Facebook has also introduced an IM service within the browser (a crappy one at that) and it is to be seen what impact it has on the IM marketshare’s.

Look out for:

• Google Wave takes collaborative chatting to the next level(real time) and hence can have a major impact on the market.
• Services like meebo and imo.im have been doing a brilliant job of combining all the services in one go.
• AOL’s integration of Twitter can have an impact on the IM marketshare too.

IM Services are moving on at a rapid pace from being personal messaging systems to being collaborative tools and innovations will be required to march ahead. As of now, Microsoft seems to hold a slight advantage with its loyal group of MSN users, but I must say Google is coming.

The next post in this series will cover areas like Browsers, Online Collaboration, The Social Space,Photo sharing and Video Sharing space and some other innovations taken up by these tech giants. Keep watching this space for the remaining part of the coverage.

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Related posts:

1. Microsoft vs Google – 2009 – Part 1 – Operating systems and Documents
2. Now Yahoo Eyes Real Time Search Domain
3. Bing – Visual Search
4. The Bing-Twitter Deal
5. Google, DoubleClick change the Display Ad system bigtime