As you know, Google is one of my favorite companies, not only for its awesome search engine, but its transformation into a diversified company that finds news, images, product prices, book excerpts, satellite maps and directions to the corner market as well offering a 2-gigabyte e-mail service, and all at your fingertips for free. These days, it's hard for me to imagine anyone betting against Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt.

But one big somebody is...

If you're interested at all in how this upstart company has shaken up the entire tech landscape, I recommend you take a few minutes to review a long and interesting article in this week's Fortune on the grudge match between Microsoft's Bill Gates and Google (link below).

A grudge match indeed, because Google's soaring stock price has brought out the seething and ruthless competitive nature that drove Gates and Microsoft to develop product category-killers like Internet Explorer back in the mid 90s that squashed archrival Netscape like a bug. In fact, according to the article, "Their popularity gets under his skin. "There's companies that are just so cool that you just can't even deal with it," he says sarcastically... ."

But trying to build products to "kill" Google has been a major source of frustration for a number of reasons. I don't want to spoil the surprise, but suffice to say, throwing money and attention at the problem in search of answers -- including some thrown their way by a canny employee -- haven't been enough to slow Google down. Yet, that is...

And, back to Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla's free open-source Web browser has certainly demonstrated how profitable, cool, useful and safe offering a free product can be.

Fortune May 2, 2005