When it comes to timing, the tech gods do work in strange ways.

There you had Google, the latter-day incarnation of the 1927 New York Yankees, tripling its fourth-quarter earnings on an obscenely strong 67 percent revenue gain. Less than an hour later, Dell, the one-time leader of the pack, issued an earnings warning and announced that founder Michael Dell was replacing Kevin Rollins as the company's chief executive.

A tale of two companies on a funky Wednesday.

Google does software, and Dell does hardware. The companies contend in entirely different realms. So at first blush, there's really not much to connect the two. But surface differences aside, both companies really do share a common DNA. Both charged out of the gate as ballsy upstarts and exploited a genius insight about their respective businesses before rivals could react.

For Google, it started--but did not end--at search. That was only a springboard. Others like Yahoo and AltaVista were in the search business a lot earlier but too slow to compete. Same went for Microsoft, which talked a great game about software as a service.

Full article: CNET News.com