Internet Explorer vs. Chrome, Bing vs. Google, Windows vs. Chrome OS – Google and Microsoft find themselves in a situation of increasingly fierce competition in different market segments. As they are competing in the markets of browsers, search engines, online advertising, operating systems, and others, both companies are fighting for market shares from one another.

While Google is still dominating the search engine market with a share of 65 percent in the US, Microsoft is market leader in the segments of browsers (67 percent) and operating systems (88 percent). In order to strengthen their position against the leader, the respective challengers utilize a well established tool: co-operations. In the following, we’ll introduce three of the latest co-operations. You can find more examples of Google and Microsoft co-operations here.

Google & Sony: sales partnership to fight Microsoft’s market leader Internet Explorer
Sony and Google have entered a sales partnership to push Google’s browser Chrome. The co-operation allows the pre-installation of Google’s Chrome on Vaio computers of Japanese consumer electronics producer Sony. For Google, this is a first of its kind deal. So far, almost every computer running Microsoft’s operating system Windows also had Internet Explorer as only browser preinstalled. First Vaio notebooks with Chrome have already been delivered. Now, Google is also in talks with other producers for additional deals. However, the deal with Sony is limited to Vaio PCs sold in the US and so far, there are no plans to install Chrome on computers sold in other countries.

Google Chrome was released about a year ago and its market share is so far only about three percent according to market researcher Net Applications. Google’s co-operation approach obviously aims to increase market share and to end the market leadership of rival Microsoft and its Internet Explorer.

Microsoft & Wolfram Alpha: striking back on search engine level with a content partnership
When it comes to search engines, Microsoft’s search engine Live Search never really had a chance against top dog Google. However, by relaunching its search engine under the name “Bing” with new features, Microsoft is now hoping to take on the big rival for real. In order to do so, Microsoft established a co-operation with the new expert search engine Wolfram Alpha. The content partnership allows Bing to present some of the specialized scientific and computational content that Wolfram Alpha generates.

Wolfram Alpha aims to enable access to figure-related knowledge, e.g. by answering questions like “How many rainy days are there in Berlin?” or “What was the exact value of Microsoft’s stock on July 6, 2007?” But the search engine, launched in May, is still fighting with teething problems.

In addition to that, Microsoft takes advantage of yet another co-operation partner: Yahoo. As recently announced, Bing will substitute the Yahoo Search in the future. I’m excited to see which additional measures Microsoft will take in order to make “to bing” the new “to google”.

Google & hardware producers: entering new market segments by a set of sales partnerships
Google is now increasingly entering other market segments, which Microsoft has so far been dominating, namely the mobile and netbook market. With the operating systems Android and Google OS, the company delivers new products and again tries to find its way into the market via sales partnerships. On its blog Google names Acer, Asus, Hewlett Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Toshiba, and others as (desired) co-operation partners.

Exploiting the full marketing potential of co-operations
Google and Microsoft are likely to continue striking new paths with partnerships. In this context, it would be desirable to also see more prominent joint communication measures within the activity catalogue with their respective co-operation partners. This would enable the two giants to stress new competencies in a credible way, while co-operation partners could take advantage of the enormous strength of the respective partner brand. The communicative potential of partnerships, however, is yet to be discovered by both of them, and even more importantly: by their co-operation partners.