redzone - 10:05 pm on Nov 10, 2004 (gmt 0)

og,
For failures you must mean having an MS operating system on virtually every computer in the world?

Touting MS as Dr. Pepper or Puffs in both your comparisons, is a bit off course.
Do you realize how many GooglePlex's you could cram into MS's Redmond complex? :)

Microsoft treated MSN like a stepchild division for many years. They feel now is the time to dominate the search market, and with their past history for market domination, they stand a good chance to repeat what they've done "over and over".

I love that Google became what they are basically on viral popularity (With a little help from Yahoo), but let's get real here. Google wasn't even a publicly traded company until a couple of months ago.

If MS comes out and publicly states they are going to dominate a specific vertical market, you can bet they are going to throw some dollars that way.

I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft for other reasons, but every one of my company's Dell PowerEdge servers runs Windows Server, our DB clusters are MS SQL, and on and on. There are a million companies just like mine, that are 100% MS houses. The rev's driven from online search are miniscule in the whole scheme of the online world.

I still say, MS bring on new search, and put a another major player on the table. It's healthy for any website owner, SEM firm, and the Internet in general.