On the dangers of worrying more about the shareholders than the filesharers (or how the community is king)

A disconcerting piece on Google's Microsoft moment. But a fundamental difference still exists between Google and Microsoft: Microsoft is and always has been driven by the need to appeal to corporate users - and in the same way that schools and education systems which use Dell/Microsoft combinations have brought children up to be adults in short trousers, so Microsoft has almost treated its consumer users as if they were mini-business people.

Google, meanwhile, has grown up in a much tougher market.

A consumer market where loyalties chop and change and where achieving a convincing adherence to a single idea is much more challenging than it ever will be when the fear factor employed in company environments can do its worst. With your boss breathing down your neck, you're unlikely to see allegedly unnecessary change as something to be dallied with.

In the meantime, as a consumer, as a free man or woman no longer bound by corporate doublespeak, at home you're quite ready to try out a new gadget, new browser, that free piece of shareware; you're quite ready to break away.

Quite desperate to, in fact.

This latter market is the one that Google has inhabited. And in a world of increasing change, where the fear of not keeping up begins to override the fear of making an allegedly unnecessary mistake, the reflexes it engenders will prepare Google far better for the corporate market it now wishes to engage with than the reverse has prepared Microsoft for the consumer market it is now trying to claim for its own.

The future is the community. The community - not the customer, not the shareholder, not even Google's hip stakeholder - will be king.

The community will mean altruism welded to self-interest combined with the dynamics of freeconomics, of exchanging products and services through the medium of electronically structured barter.

Maybe this is Google's Microsoft moment, after all. But it will only be so if Google loses the lightness of touch that allowed it to capture its users so consummately. It will only be so if it falls into the trap of using fear to keep its followers on board. It will only be so if it forgets who is king.

It will only be so if it ever gets to the point of worrying more about the shareholders than the filesharers.

That's why Web 2.0 is essentially 21st century democratic socialism in action.

And whilst we both need each other, whilst Google needs its demanding community of consumers and its demanding community of consumers needs all the services it provides for free, Google will remain far enough away from Microsoft for a real difference to be made.

For the difference is as follows: when Google gives you something free, you believe it's up to them to work out how to monetise it - you believe (even if it's not the case) that they're clever enough to turn water into wine. When Microsoft gives you something free, you just know it's a question of crass cross-subsidy - designed to kill a decent and competent competitor in its tracks.

Whilst Microsoft turns beautiful women into pillars of salt, Google is able to part the waves.

That's how it feels right now, anyhow.