Robert Cringely: Google will win. Google will be the internet.

Robert Cringely was the keynote speaker at WebMasterWorld's Pubcon in Las Vegas. He is currently running NerdTV, a weekly one-hour webcast, and has a weekly column on the PBS website. In the past 20 years, he has among other things worked on the Apple Lisa (where he created the trashcan concept), and created the TV documentary series Triumph of the Nerds.

In his speech, he talked about the internet strategies of Microsoft and Google. Microsoft has recently declared war on what it considers to be its biggest threat and competitor: Google. But there is no doubt in Cringely's mind that Google will win. Both companies have a completely different approach. Microsoft "wants to be your friend". Essentially the company makes big money on Windows and Office, and loses a lot of money on everything else. Like 3 billion dollars on the X-box gaming console. Losing money on a lot of stuff has advantages for Microsoft, Cringely says. When things go really bad for Microsoft, there will be enough stuff to cut away to keep the price/earnings ratio constant and the shareholders happy. But Microsoft will never be a leader in things like gaming or the internet.

Google has a company culture that is much more geeky. They want to impress everybody with how big their brains are, and that sometimes gets them an image problem. But they are essentially looking inwards and to the technical stuff. Their applications are based on their distributed cluster of cheap off-the-shelves PCs (estimated to be more than 200,000 pieces now) rather than expensive servers. With all the rumors of Google buying up 'dark fiber' (unused fiber in the ground but not yet connected to routers), Google is probably going for the control of a large portion of the internet infrastructure. They want to be the internet.

Want to know more? Aaron Wall was liveblogging the keynote. Read his report.