I think you missed the point I was making: diversity of ecosystems is important. Microsoft provides diversity to many of the ecosystems above. Having 2-3 competitors is much better than a single one, and Microsoft has shown that they need to win developers by providing value to the community.

I think we agree that diversity is good, I disagree that their is enough. OS's might be the only one I think is diversified enough because between Google, Win, OS X & numerous flavors of linux there are a lot of choices. There is also "the web" and Solaris & BSD as well. Google is peerless for search. Leaving aside email, apps & core other services like web infrastructure, there is no replacement for google. It is important to realize that not only is Google peerless, but that all search engines run PageRank. By that I mean, they copy pagerank by creating extremely similar algorithims and using all of the ideas google pioneered. No one has innovated in the search space except google. backlink totals is an utterly meaningless metric and authority/reputation are subjective.

Google has adjusted to their original thesis of course, however everyone else adjusts to google. If you are selling something in a market that speaks English, you want to be at the top of Google. That is it. SEO means google optimization. No one can be better at being google than google, but I would likek to see someone try and be better than them at search.