Google (GOOG) appears to be taking dead aim at the heart of the enemy: Microsoft (MSFT) Windows.
Thomas Weisel Partners analyst Christa Quarles Monday morning writes in a research note this morning that she has always believed Microsoft’s fight with Google in the search market was “the battle to prevent Google from getting to the war,” the PC desktop. But with Google having largely won the search battle, she says, the company is “readying its armies to start marching onto the desktop.”
Quarles say Google’s prospects for success in competing with Windows if they had come after them on the desktop right from the beginning would have been low. Instead, she ntoes, the company has gone after the smart phone market, where Microsoft is far weaker. She thinks Google is now positioned to come after Windows, first on the netbook level, but ultimately “as a full-fledged competitor putting the company in a psoition to tap into additional business models around its cloud offerings.”
The piece includes an eye-opening of announced or speculated Android devices in the works:
- Acer: Netbook expected to launch Q3.
- Asus: Smart phone in the second half; netbook eventually, date uncertain.
- Dell (DELL): Smart phone in the second half; netbook eventually, date uncertain.
- Garmin/Asus (GRMN): Smart phone, second half.
- Hewlett-Packard (HPQ): Netbook, date uncertain.
- HTC: New smartphone, second half.
- Huawei: Smart phone, second half.
- Lenovo: Smart phone, date uncertain.
- LG: Smart phone, second half.
- Motorola (MOT): Smart phone, second half.
- Samsung: Smart phone, Q3.
- Sony (SNE): Media player, date uncertain.
- Sony Ericsson: Smart phone, second half.
