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In certain verticals, Bing really outshines Google like travel search, video search, and image search. Bing maps is really quite good.

Microsoft is a cash cow, and has multiple sources of strong revenue. Google has one: advertising. Microsoft can afford to bleed cash for years, just to give Google a black eye.

Microsoft only this past year got out from under government oversight for antitrust violations. I've spent quite a bit of time talking to people at Microsoft the past 2 years. A lot of the BizSpark team are ex-Sun people. And a number of them have mentioned to me how shocked they were at how profoundly the anti trust litigation still affected employees within the company 10 years later.

Windows 8 is the first OS since ME that comes out without government anti trust oversight, and it looks like Microsoft has come out swinging, both at Apple and Google. http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/KEY-0001

Google is just now starting to get into anti trust how water, and I have no idea how they are going to get out of it. I think Yelp in particular has a really strong case: http://www.pcworld.com/article/240330/google_faces_antitrust...




  Microsoft can afford to bleed cash for years
Except that's exactly what they've been doing for a long time now. Microsoft reminds me of a cliche fat cat executive who's always red in the face, yells and bosses everyone around, and acts like he's invincible... until he keels over from a heart attack.


So some companies do resemble their CEO!


Except that for pretty much every year it has been in business the revenue and the profits have been growing.


Sure the company as a whole is profitable. But if their internet businesses were it's own company, and run in this manner, they wouldn't survive. They're sure good at keeping up an appearance of extreme arrogance.




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