Things are really going to heat up in the tech space in 2006. Not only are their hundreds if not thousands of startups trying to do big things, the big companies in power positions are starting to bring out their big guns.

Google has been building new applications and releasing them all year long, and there’s no reason to think they’re going to stop anytime soon.

Yahoo has been snapping up startups like Flickr, del.icio.us, and Upcoming.org to solidify and grow their place in the new space.

Amazon is even getting into the game with the release of the Alexa index and offering up of computing power.

Now comes word from Ray Ozzie that Microsoft is going to make 2006 the year of “The Build”.

That’s a big deal. As an example think of the news that the new version of Outlook will have RSS built in. All of the sudden that gives all the Outlook users everywhere easy access to RSS in the application they already spend all their day using. What does that do to all the RSS reader startups?

It won’t just be Microsoft battling startups though, Richard Macmanus thinks that Microsoft is going to be big competition for Google in 2006.

I think he’s right. Microsoft is starting to see the way being Ozzie and Scoble so a battle is brewing. It should be fun to watch.