Google has been quietly gunning away at the technology behemoths. Being itself a giant, it makes things easier for Google to take on the might of Microsoft and Apple. Just as recession is ending, Google beat market expectations and grew 7% for Q3 ending, September 2009, as compared to Q3 in 2008. Ad spending, undoubtedly is flooding Google's coffers once again, after a rather grim year of recessionary trend. Google announced a surprise bonus for all employees across its board, as an incentive for their efforts during October 2009.
Riding on the wave of the strong growth, Google, which has always been quietly working at spreading its wings far and wide, is investing more in view of the positive outlook in the economy. Cues such as its aggressive ad campaigning for businesses to adopt its Google Apps services to embrace its enterprise search appliance option are just an indicator. Touted as Gone Google, the marketing campaign is going to be featured in airports, high traffic spots through billboards.
Google, clearly is also pioneering the cloud computing phenomenon, to have any or all softwares hosted in an internet cloud hosted by Google, and accessed by an entire enterprise, rather than store them in separate servers, thus saving costs for big and small organizations alike.
Google's Android open source mobile platform, for mobile phone handsets is just beginning to open up. In what is being touted as the biggest threat to Apple's iPhone yet, Motorola, after being on the wane for almost 2 years in the mobile market, would hope that Droid would change its fortunes. Droid, runs the Google Android software, and will be sold by Verizon Wireless in the U.S. That would mean a 3 way battle through one collaboration : Verizon taking on AT&T; Motorola taking on iPhone; Google taking on Apple itself !