Google may be heading deep into Microsoft's territory

International Herald Tribune: "Perhaps the most glaring omission from Google's remarkable 'owner's manual' for its initial public offering, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last week, is that the company, operator of the world's leading search engine, gave prospective shareholders virtually no hint of where it was headed.

Clearly, one of Google's principal challenges will be how well it can defend itself when competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo begin copying its computing system and offering similar services.

After e-mail, what else is on the company's agenda? Obviously, a long line of new services waits in the pipeline. Indeed, by giving all its engineers and scientists one day a week to pursue their own projects, Google may finally have discovered how to institutionalize creativity and passion in Silicon Valley in a way that goes beyond the rush to a stock offering.

It can be seen in the people on the payroll. At the moment, more Ph.D.'s in computer science from the University of Washington work at Google than at Microsoft.

"In the last two years, Google has been the company that has really gone after good people," said Dave Culler, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.

And that's what might frighten the Microsoft programmers most."