A Fast Second

Or Third. Or Fourth.

It doesn’t matter much. With $50 Billion in cash, Microsoft can be anything. David Kirkpatrick writes a long article in Fortune on how Microsoft plays catch up to Google, Salesforce.com, even some unknown littles like Writely.com and Numsum.com.

The bottomline is, Microsoft will emerge ahead of most of these companies eventually, with the possible exception of Google, who has a similarly powerful and / or growing market cap and cash reserve.

Web Services, Ad-supported Services – these are still early markets in the grand scheme of things, and I see no reason why Microsoft cannot recast parts of itself into that mode.

On Google, I have to admit, Bill Gates’ quote made me smile: “Google is great, they are smart people, the press should continue to feed their arrogance as much as possible,” he says.