It’s happening. Gloves are strapped on tightly. The crowd has gathered as the battle has been notched up a level. We all draw a breath. Who will win the fight? We each have our favorites. We’ll place our bets. The stakes are high.

In the left-hand corner, the challengers have gathered, flexing new found muscles. They have pooled their resources. There is no other way for them to contemplate taking on the champion. On their own, they can’t make a dent in the armory.

Over in the right-hand corner, the champion has already ratcheted up the game plan.

It’s going to be a long drawn-up bitter battle between powerful, well-resourced opponents that have each squared up to fight the fight of their lifetimes for the mantle of the world’s greatest.

The first punch lands. It’s Bing to rattle Google.
A swift blow is returned. Chrome clobbers Internet Explorer.
The challenger pumps weights. It gets bigger muscles. Yahoo! and Microsoft join forces.
Then Kapow. From Goliath comes Google Apps.

Sit back and enjoy the entertainment, people. There is plenty more to come.

So, who will be the world’s greatest?

Before you place your bets, consider these factors:

The brands are powerful.
Both Yahoo! and Microsoft are brands that are tiring.
Google is a brand that is growing stronger.
But facing off at each other is distracting all of them from other would-be challengers.
They all have their eyes off the ball.

Search is enormously popular today.
It’s still novel. People are curious about what’s out there.
But with the Internet growing so big, will people continue to depend so heavily on search?
Or, like they grew tired of advertising, will they lock in favorite destinations and just go there, thus bypassing the search engine? (Let’s admit it, it’s fun but time-consuming to spend all day online, surfing around.)

And then there is software.
The customer wants software that is platform-ubiquitous.
So they can run Linux, Apple or any operating system they choose.
Will the winner of the office software war develop software that is installed in a hard drive or just accessed, on demand, from the cloud?
And will it be provided for free?

And my prediction…

Will it be Google? Yes for search. They might ultimately take the browser business too (if they can fix the bug that keeps shutting down Chrome each time I try to open a PDF file). Perhaps Google sniffs the same futures that I do. Owning the browser is an important strategic move.

Will it be Yahoo!? Nope. Not for anything.

And Microsoft? Yes for office software. For the moment. But Microsoft should be feeling the beads of sweat on its forehead.

Because my prediction is that somewhere out there is a small band of entrepreneurs that will create a simple-to-use, feature-rich, browser-based office software package. It’s going to be a suite of products that works on any computer or device that has internet connectivity, regardless of its operating system.

And, in the future, you might even dispense of your hard drive. Why have it if you store your files at Amazon S3?

The future is clear. It’s as clear as mud.

So who will dominate the world?

No-one. At least that’s what I think.

Consumers will continue to choose different products and services from different supplies, having regard for the relative strengths of each brand. And the regulator will continue to be increasingly nervous about Goliaths that get too big for their boots.

UPDATE:

Well, it would seem that someone has developed fully-featured office software that is compatible with any operating system. You can check it out at OpenOffice.

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