A tale about 3 little piggies.
One little piggy tried to build a better (search) mousetrap – Microsoft.
One little piggy tried to improve the current mousetrap – Yahoo!
One little piggy, a one-trick pony BTW, cried, “Whee, whee, whee”, all the way to the DOJ’s antitrust department.
Who was that whinny, cowardly piggy?
Google, that’s who!
Trust that New York fishwrap to come up with what is nothinig more than an attention-grabbing headline: Google complains to the DOJ about Microsoft.
Acting, as all educated people now suspect, as the mouthpiece of an undisclosed state(s) Attorney General’s mouthpiece, the NYTimes basically regurgitated what is a mouthful of inaccuracies, innuendos, and utter nonsense.
In the process, the article maligned the pro-business policies of the current administration as being pro-Microsoft, a total farce. However, that was not all. It then proceeded to achieve a new (for them) low by besmirching the career of an innocent solicitor in the process.
As usual, the Microsoft haters went out in force, as it is the current rôle of the intelligentsia to berate Microsoft, all because of jealousy over that company’s immense success.
Joe Wilcox, currently of Microsoft Watch, was The Microsoft Monitor for years, and has what I think is the best analysis, so far, of the situation. He notes that,
Back in November, a mystery company filed a legal complaint about Windows Vista. The company has been revealed to be Google, in a breach of legal protocol.
[…]
The Times story pits an allegedly pro-business Bush administration against a so-called righteous states position regarding the Google complaint. Isn’t Google a business, too? Extending the story’s position forward, shouldn’t the Bush administration be as pro-Google as pro-Microsoft? The Times’ logic is weak.
[…]
Again, I don’t mean to disparage the Times, but today’s story reads like a state attorney general manifesto. The story indicates the Justice Department wanted to drop the Google complaint, and somehow that is pro-business and so, therefore, pro-Microsoft and unjust. Huh?
[…]
The consent decree applies to software defined as middleware by the agreement. Vista search failed to meet the middleware definition for at least three reasons, any of which would have been enough. For example, the consent decree had already defined the middleware categories with respect to Windows XP. Search was not defined as middleware in XP and so could not be defined as part of Windows Vista. Had search been a new feature, it could have fulfilled one criterion for being middleware.
[…]
That said, Microsoft has done some search unbundling in Vista compared with XP. The end user’s default search engine in Internet Explorer 7 applies elsewhere. For example, Web search initiated from the search box on the Vista tool bar uses the default search engine, even Google. By comparison, Google doesn’t provide a similar mechanism for using another search engine from its desktop or tool bar search products.
How is that for a balanced view of this mess? Thanks for that viewpoint, Joe*
Comes to the crucial point: does Google fear a real fight? Can they continue to produce in the face of real competition. Does a level playing field frighten them?
One of these days, the movie being seen by the soon-to-be-disaffected investors in GOOG will be called The Emperor’s New Groove, where the plot will reveal the wannabe emperor to be a one-trick pony, and without any clothes!
*Sometime in 2004, I insinuated that Joe might be channeling me – actually, he is not, since he is much smarter than I am. This time again, our views run parallel.
Note: Paul McNamara’ Buzzblog disagrees with John Obeto’s opinion. Read the Buzzblog post here.
