Its like the typical bollywood underworld story which is told from the anti hero’s perspective… The hero makes his entrance to save society from the evil villain’s menace, then takes the villain’s place, and pretty soon the line between good and evil becomes a big blur…
In the internet story, MS played the big villain, thanks to its monopolistic leanings and bundling tactics, almost forcing users to choose it.. and that set the scene for the entry of the perfect hero – google… and as the story goes, slowly but surely google trumped the villain at every possible juncture in a matter of few years… and users stuck to it, inspite of blips like Gmail being a snoopy service that peeps into their mailbox…
And Google went on with its contextual relatonship with its customers… after all how can google serve its users best until it knows all that is to know about the user… so that it can serve up ads well in context and give the user the correct info exactly when he needs it… and the behemoth continues into radio ads, moves into the television ad space and local billboard space.. all in the guise of the hero serving the society, slowly converting homo sapiens into homo searchians…
after all even if the slogan is “don’t be evil”, all it takes is changing the definition of evil…
until next time, should the users feel lucky ?