It was barely 10 years ago - in August 1998 - that Andy Bechtolsheim, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, wrote a US$100 000 cheque that helped Stanford computer science graduates Sergey Brin and Larry Page start Google.
For Bechtolsheim, it was money incredibly well spent. The cash, along with another $1m in seed funding from various sources, helped Brin and Page to start implementing their world-changing plan to index the world's information and make it instantly searchable.
Though Google wasn't the world's first search engine - Infoseek, Lycos, HotBot, Excite and AltaVista all came before it - it came to dominate Web search.
Google became the world's dominant search engine through a unique method of indexing and ranking websites, known as PageRank (after inventor Page), which helped it produce better results than its rivals at the time - tech-savvy Web users quickly made Google their default search engine. Today, more than 70% of Internet search requests worldwide are done using Google's engine - in SA, it's more than 80%.
It's well documented that Google has entered the lexicon as a verb: to google something is to look it up on the Web.
Users also loved Google's minimalist homepage. Unlike the cluttered websites from rivals such as Yahoo, which would take ages to load on the prebroadband dial-up connections of the late 1990s, Google offered a simple search box below its now iconic, four-colour logo.
Though Google has come to offer myriad services, from Gmail to Google Earth, its home page has changed very little in the past decade.
Most of the services the company offers today, from Web search to online office productivity tools, are free of charge. Yet the company is remarkably profitable. In its financial year to December 31 2007, it reported a net profit of $4,2bn on revenues of $16,6bn. The vast majority of this revenue is from advertising rather than the sale of online services - all but a few corporate solutions from Google are available gratis.
The secret of Google's financial success has been its mastery of contextual ads - ads that match the content of a particular website or search result.
In 2000, the company began selling text-based ads associated with search keywords. It later created a syndicated ad service where website operators could place Google ads on their sites in return for a revenue share with the company. People put Google-syndicated ads on their sites, and, provided they are well-trafficked, Google sends them a monthly cheque. Each month Google cumulatively pays website operators millions of dollars for carrying advertising on its behalf.
Though Google doesn't disclose the revenue split to these websites - much to the chagrin of many website operators - the company has paid out enough for a few bloggers to make a living from doing nothing other than blogging.
The system, known as AdSense, has even resulted in ads appearing on websites operated by traditional media companies, though many are still reluctant to engage with a company they regard as a rival.
But media companies' fear of Google pales into insignificance next to the worries the company gives Microsoft and its CEO Steve Ballmer. As Google expands into a range of online services, it is increasingly being seen as the biggest-ever threat to Microsoft's hegemony in the software space and technology industry generally.
Software is beginning to be delivered as a service over the Internet, a model Google is helping pioneer. But it's a model that directly threatens the client-server model of computing pioneered by Microsoft, the one that involves installing complex client-side applications and keeping data on a local PC.
In Google's model, applications are delivered as a service on the Web. So, if you need to produce a document, you'd log on to an application via your Web browser and write and save files directly to Google's servers.
In large enterprises, which distrust placing their sensitive corporate documents in the "cloud" (an IT industry term for services that exist beyond the corporate firewall), Google sells appliances - computer servers, effectively - that deliver its applications inside corporate networks.
All major software vendors - Microsoft included - are trying to retool themselves for the software-as-a-service (Saas) model.
But Microsoft says online software services will merely act as an adjunct to PC-based applications. It would say that, of course: analysts believe the Saas model is likely to lead to lower margins for software vendors in the long term. Microsoft has a vested interest in ensuring that the current model is retained as long as possible.
Hostilities between Microsoft and Google go back several years but continue to escalate. In 2005, Ballmer reportedly vowed in a meeting: "I'm going to fucking kill Google." Then, in 2007, he called Google a "one-hit wonder" with "insane" growth expectations.
It's perhaps no surprise, then, that Google has released its own Web browser, Chrome. Analysts have said the company fears Microsoft could try to use its dominance in the browser market to drive Internet users to its own services and away from Google's.
A few months ago, Microsoft walked away from a $33/share, $47,5bn offer to acquire Yahoo, but that doesn't signal the company's desire to beat Google is in any way diminished. Far from it.
Google has extended the battle across a wide front, and now offers services ranging from a powerful stock market information and charting tool, to maps, instant messaging, a blogging platform, a powerful online calendaring system and a news service that aggregates the world's news sources.
But it's in Web search that Google has done its most groundbreaking and important work. The company has fundamentally changed the way we look for information and use the Internet.
For most people, that'd be more than a big enough accomplishment. But Brin and Page and CEO Eric Schmidt are clearly far from done.
Sun's Bechtolsheim couldn't possibly have imagined the empire that would emerge from his $100 000 investment.
