Google's CEO said today the company is coming out with a free knock-off of PowerPoint. If you have no idea about the implications of this announcement, skip this post. I'm not going to explain it, you probably wouldn't care anyway, and you'll end up one day using the Google suite of desktop products without ever knowing there was once an alternative. When you turn 50 someone will tell you that you're stupid for using Google. You'll object, you'll be wrong, and the new guard will march over you.

Meanwhile, on today's news, Microsoft watchers everywhere got as mobilized and as vocal and visible, relatively speaking, as mass murderer experts on cable news the last two days. Everyone has a point of view. Everyone is an expert. Everyone knows what all this means. Maybe they do.

Here's what I know. Anyone who believes Microsoft is eternal doesn't know the history of technology corporations. With few exceptions, they live to die, no matter how big and beautiful they are, and not usually by natural causes. Most, figuratively speaking, either commit suicide or are murdered.

Do you recall, for example, the number one and only name in word processing long before Word? That would be Wang. They're gone. How about minicomputers? That would be Digital Equipment Corporation. They're gone. Cullinet, the leading provider of 4GL packaged applications? History. Data General, Prime Computer, Compaq, Lexitron, General Automation, Cambridge Technology Partners,. Data Printer, Centronics, GRid Computer, Diablo, Plexus, Corvus, Northstar? Gone. Lotus… swallowed and digested whole. Cabletron? Apollo? I won't live long enough to walk down this memory lane.

[It's not just high tech, either. Can you say Arthur Andersen, Howard Johnsons, Rexall Drug, Lechmere, Peck and Peck, Tandy, Radio Shack (gasping), Tower Records (what's a "record,"), just to name a few?] Big companies grow old and immune to new ideas. New ideas that change the model threaten their system. They react by giving their old system a bear hug (read: Vista). They hang on for dear life, and the opposite happens. They get clawed to death. Don't write me about the IBM exception, please. IBM is a leading cause of independent technology company premature extinction. For that I give them tremendous credit. Those who can, do, and those who can't buy it. IBM is unique in my opinion for understanding this, as they keeping inching away from pure high tech while cozying up to consulting. Still, they're alive and well and that's to their benefit… IBM is an exception. Microsoft won't be. Google won't be, either. IBM is Hepburn. Microsoft and Google are Anna Nicoles.

Most people think a big important tech company that's been around a long time is essentially invulnerable in any serious way. I, on the other hand, have seen serious, big, important tech companies with long histories catch cold and die virtually overnight from pneumonia. At one time when they were my client, Digital Equipment was hiring 100 people a day. Their VP of sales said they could sell a VAX in less time than it would take one to fall out of a 727 and hit the ground. Then DEC did it's digital imitation of Lockerbie.

This isn't about whether or not Microsoft deserves to expire. This is about whether or not any tech organization can sustain its youthful brilliance in combination with extraordinary growth and market dominance forever. History shows again and again that some smart kid — a pair of smarties in this instance – will come along and change everything. There are one or two teenagers right now in Hoboken, NJ., or Boise Idaho, or somewhere in India, who will figure out a way to pay us for looking at advertising and Google will be history. The point is, Microsoft isn't that force. Microsoft is going to send its CEO out to rattle cages while Microsoft's legal department suggests careful Justice Department reviews of Google acquisitions and while all that is going on, those one or two kids from Bumwater, Wisconsin, are hatching a new model. Nobody who is anybody today gets to live. Get it? That's the beauty and the tragedy of technology.

Cotton don't grow like it once did in the old south. Oil doesn't gush out of the ground in Texas like it used to. The software that defines the world isn't coming exclusively from the northwestern part of the United States. By 2025 if an independent, profitable Microsoft still exists, it will be but a shadow of its former self. If by 2050 Google is still around as a profitable, independent, industry-dominant entity, come find me. The drinks and the ghoulish laughs will be on me.

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