Google's 'Sneak Attack' Could Devastate 'Software Companies' Apple and Microsoft

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Sounds crazy. Feels crazy to say it. But Google (GOOG) is about to break out in a major way.

Google is a social search and software company. Microsoft (MSFT) is a software company that, outside of Xbox, has done a horrendous job both producing its own hardware and outsourcing such efforts. Apple (AAPL) , for all it does right, is not a software company.

To review -- and to extend that train of thought:

• Google is a software/services company.
• Microsoft is a software/services company that does some hardware, will probably do more, but has only been successful once.
• Apple is a hardware company that does software/services well, but not well enough.
• All three companies ultimately do both. They all need to be better in both areas.

In this article, I focus on software/services. I lump the two together to mean operating systems as they drive productivity suites as actual software products (Office, iWork), entertainment and consumer platforms (Google Play, iTunes, App Store) and, increasingly, as cloud services (iCloud, Google Docs) and vice versa.

A while back, I established that Apple should beef up its productivity applications -- Pages, Keynote, Numbers -- and move to put Microsoft out of business in the enterprise. If it was able to annihilate the BlackBerry (BBRY) and trigger the BYOD (bring your own device) craze, it could certainly do more than ding Microsoft's corporate software/services dominance.

But, as I was noodling along that line, I admittedly took Google too lightly. What a bonehead oversight by me. Mea freaking culpa.