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  <title>Comments for Wired on Google&apos;s Microsoft Moment</title>
  <subtitle>A Blog About Making Culture</subtitle>
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    <id>tag:dashes.com,2009:/anil//1.7226</id>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://dashes.com/anil/2009/07/more-on-googles-microsoft-moment.html" />
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    <published>2009-07-26T03:29:40Z</published>
    <updated>2009-07-26T03:53:07Z</updated>
    <title>Wired on Google&apos;s Microsoft Moment</title>
    <summary>If you liked my post on Google&apos;s Microsoft Moment last week, you may well enjoy Fred Vogelstein&apos;s detailed piece in this month&apos;s Wired. I think...</summary>
    <author>
      <name>Anil</name>
      <uri>http://anildash.com/</uri>
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      <![CDATA[<p>If you liked my post on <a href="http://dashes.com/anil/2009/07/googles-microsoft-moment.html">Google's Microsoft Moment</a> last week, you may well enjoy <a href="http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-08/mf_googlopoly?currentPage=all">Fred Vogelstein's detailed piece</a> in this month's Wired.</p>

<p>I think no small part of the reason so many people enjoyed my post and responded to it was that I deliberately chose an evocative title by referencing Microsoft. Microsoft is shorthand for a whole, complicated set of emotions and responses in the tech and business world, and the brand itself is very effective at communicating a complicated idea very efficiently. Wired's made a few interesting choices in their own headlines:</p>


<ul>
<li>The online story is titled "Why Is Obama's Top Antitrust Cop Gunning for Google?"</li>
<li>The print magazine's teaser line on the cover says "Is Google a Monopoly?"</li>
<li>The story itself is headlined in the table of contents and on the page as "Keyword: Monopoly".</li>
</ul>



<p>Now, "monopoly" in a context like this is intimately associated with Microsoft, but "Keyword" actually feels like <span class="caps">AOL </span>speak, not something particular to Google. And the Obama reference (as opposed to, say, the <span class="caps">DOJ </span>or the administration as a whole or Eric Holder as Attoryney General) seems a little off. But I think it's no accident that the story itself opens with the quote "I think you are going to see a repeat of Microsoft."</p>

<p>Clearly, this perspective on Google's current dominance and cultural shift has reached its moment in the zeitgeist. But aside from the fact that this is an idea (or at least a meme) whose time has come, I think it's interesting to see exactly which way of articulating the idea is most effective in getting people to talk about Google's moment of reckoning.</p>]]>
      
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