Some major market moves are being made by Microsoft and Google, as they jostle for position to become the mightiest of the mighty in our digitally connected lives.

After the bungle with Vista, Microsoft is gearing up to launch its Windows 7 operating system. However the fallout from Vista could affect the take-up of Windows 7. A survey of 20,000 IT administrators by Scriptlogic found that one in three organizations has no plans to deploy Windows 7. Another 34 percent said they would deploy Windows 7 by the end of 2010, and 5.4 percent will deploy it by the end of this year.

Of course, the reluctance is natural this early on in the cycle. Many IT organisations wait until Microsoft issues the first major updates after release so any of the most flagrant bugs have been worked out of the system.

Google's announcement it will launch an alternative next year makes the success of Windows 7 crucial to Microsoft's dominance in the market. It is a watershed for the company, as it is for Google, which made the long-anticipated announcement this month that it would be launching an operating system under the Chrome brand. Google's operating system will be open source and free.

Some tech commentators have also noted that with Chrome OS (there is a Chrome browser), Google will be breaking new ground. An operating system is mission critical. Google can no longer apply its current market model of launching a wave of applications and software and then ironing out the bugs later. Chrome OS will have to be good enough from the start to engender the trust needed for its wider uptake.

Microsoft is also attempting to counter the possible threat of Google and others pushing into its lucrative Office market. Microsoft has announced it will make a scaled down version of the suite online for free. Google allows online document sharing through Google Docs, which is increasingly finding more use in the business sector. I know some of my colleagues are using the free service as a means of collaborating online with multiple partners working on the same document. The service ensures everyone is working on the most current version of a document.

Who will win among the titans? Who cares, but at least there is an upstart goading the Microsoft benign monopoly into improving its products. That's the way competition is supposed to work. Let's see if the older behemoth can renew itself as a market innovator.

If you are a budding developer you can help out. Google has called on the open source community to contribute to the development of Chrome OS, which will be built atop a Linux foundation. It would be a good opportunity to get into a pretty good profession.

Richard Brandt, author of 'Inside Larry And Sergey's Brain', put the moves into perspective in a column published on CNBC.com: "The Chrome OS is a catalyst. It will show others the way, and act as the seed that moves many industries, from telecommunications to computers, and perhaps someday to television and books, into the Post-PC era and into the true Internet Age."

***

Once again, a 15-year-old is making the buzz on the Internet, this time not as a hacker, but as a Morgan Stanley media commentator. The investment firm asked Matthew Robson, a summer intern at its UK office, to write about how he and his friends consume media.

"Without claiming representation or statistical accuracy, his piece provides one of the clearest and most thought provoking insights we have seen," says Morgan Stanley in the report. "So we published it." OK, fine. But I cannot understand all the hullabaloo over the ordinary observations of a teenager. Perhaps the most surprising claim by Robson was that "teenagers do not use twitter". Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they release that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). In addition, they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their 'tweets' are pointless.

Ok, so we know teenagers do not like to read newspapers, and enjoy Facebook, gaming, movies, texting and music but are constrained by the cost. Leave out the Facebook and texting add in "hanging out at malls and talking on the phone" and the report would be no different that when I was a teenager. I guess a lot of media people and investment analysts were shocked that a teenager could write a Morgan Stanley report.

If you are a teenager see if the report captures how you consume media. It is available at the Financial Times site: http://media.ft.com/ cms/c3852b2e-6f9a-11de-bfc5-00144feabdc0.pdf

Send any comments to elamin.ahmed@gmail.com