Ten years ago this month twentysomething technology graduates Larry Page and Sergey Brin joined the throng hoping to make it big on the internet and incorporated their company in a garage in Menlo Park, California. They succeeded in spectacular fashion. The full details are readily available on Google, the company they created.

In its first decade Google has become part of everyday life — 722m people visited a Google site in July this year.

No company has been so dominant in its sphere since Microsoft took ownership of computer desktops with its Windows software — but even mighty Microsoft didn’t see its trade name transformed into a verb.

By placing relevant advertisements beside its search results, and on other websites, Google has built a business that last year had revenues of $16.6 billion (£9.4 billion). And as the internet has changed, Google has changed too, expanding its ambitions beyond the search business by adding companies that include the video site YouTube and the online advertising firm Double Click.

Last week the company laid the groundwork for its next big push — one that will inevitably intensify an already heated battle with Microsoft, Google’s arch enemy.

News of Google’s latest move leaked out in the most old-fashioned way. A postal mishap led to German blogger Philipp Lenssen receiving a comic book explaining the benefits of Google’s new Chrome web browser days before the official release.

The news set the tech world alight. Most people take their browser for granted, blaming the website or the computer when a page fails to load or crashes on the internet. While the tech-savvy know that browsers matter and there are a handful of different ones on the market, few people swap.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer comes installed on most of the world’s PCs and has 75% of the market; some 25% of users still use a version of Explorer that is more than seven years old. Explorer’s closest rival, Firefox, has just under 20% of the market.

However, the nature of computing is undergoing another seismic shift, and browsers are becoming hot once more as the internet becomes the delivery channel for an increasing number of software programs and services that were once sold, like Windows, in a box.

“This is a huge move for Google,” said Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, a blog that covers search engines and search marketing. “It’s another sign that Google is more than just search. ”

IN JULY Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s combative chief executive, hosted his first annual financial analysts’ meeting without his old running mate Bill Gates. After presentations, Microsoft bigwigs mingle with the analysts, reporters and investors. The big names attract a ring of listeners hoping to catch a titbit of information — Microsofties call the clusters doughnuts.

Those in Ballmer’s doughnut wanted to know about the cloud. “Cloud computing” is the buzz term of the season. Instead of storing information and loading programs on to our PCs, tech firms believe that in the future all information and programming will be stored on the internet — “the cloud” — and can then be accessed when we want it, where we want it.

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