The economist has a nice piece on how Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft seem to be circling the wagons with respect to Google’s success. New alliances are being forged, and strategic partnerships are being hammered out. The article finishes by pondering if any mergers will actually happen — and makes it sound like Microsoft is utterly quivering with desire at the thought (of buying one of their ‘allies’ out).

Its funny — there was a time when Microsoft was the 900lb Gorrila … my, my, how the tables have turned.
Microsoft must truly be desperate in this web2.0 world to be opening up its proprietary protocols, to start creating alliances with other companies. But is it enough?

I doubt it.
What makes Google the new 900lb Gorrilla, but as well, the elephant that everyone sees *and* talks about isn’t necessarily its acquisitions, although its made a few of their own.

Google’s success seems to be based on the following:

1) The speed at which they’re doing things: If you watch the official blog, its like they’re rolling out something new everyday
2) The culture of intelligencia: They value smart people doing smart stuff, and reward them for doing so.
3) Their willingness to share: Between their APIs, and opening up endless Betas, they want you to play with them (in a non-dirty way).

Now, do *any* of these things have to do with connecting various web-apps or non-web-apps together?
Not at all.

Have any of either Yahoo, AOL, or Microsoft demonstrated any of these “soft” qualities that Google has?
Its arguable that at one point Microsoft hired and cultivated the best and the brightest — and maybe they still do, but the perception isn’t there any more … and certainly there’s been one article questioning whether or not new development is not guided by what’s new, what’s needed, or what’s cool, but guarding the bottom line.

Now, I know Google’s not perfect.
How can they be after they’ve decided to sue the pants off of people who use their name as Verb (even though the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary has listed “small g” Google as a verb).

(And let’s be frank … my pants aren’t worth that much!)

But they’re certainly putting their competencies in places that their competitors don’t.
And if what your competitors do is any measure of your success, Google seems to be doing the right things most of the time.