Google - The next Microsoft (?)

There is no doubt that Google is expanding at an alarming rate, and is all set to be the biggest company in the IT industry.
Was going through the new products of google at Google Labs. There you can find new projects of google, most of which are in the testing stage. There you can find gtalk-labs edition, with invisibility feature (but it has some other problems). One interesting software I found here is "Lively by Google". Its a chat software; but much better than the normal ones. Here you have to create an avatar for yourself, before chatting. You can have fun playing with the animated avatars. There are many chat rooms too(discos, club bars , cafes, beaches, etc), which you can join. And the avatar sometimes reacts according to what you type too...if you type lol or rofl, your avatar would start laughing!
I was watching Download- The true story of the internet, a documentary on discovery channel hosted by John Heileman, sometime back. It showed how Netscape had challenged Microsoft in the 90s, but eventually lost the battle to the giants. But google now doesnt show any sign of losing.They have now come up with their browser- chrome- which is not the best browser now, but is only going to get better. Once Google comes up with their own Operating System(they do use "Goobuntu"- a linux distribution based on ubuntu, but only internally), and something to replace MS Office, they can have the monopoly. But microsoft is not going to watch everything, doing nothing!