My point is simply that you can't generalize and say MS sucks at web because they've had no success at search - they have multiple platforms that are or are close to market leaders, just not search.

Can you imagine anyone writing about how Google should just admit they suck at web because they (also) only have a few actually-significant properties on the web?

There's 3 MS and 5 Google properties on this page of the top 20 web properties according to Alexa - http://www.alexa.com/topsites

Neither sucks at web as a whole. But MS sucks at trying to dislodge Google from search and Google sucks at being anything but search (and YouTube, which was already massively successful when they bought it).