Google is much less adept at avoiding the ire of antitrust agencies, particularly under the current administration. Google is considerably more evil in the popular imagination at this point.
Google's incredible monopoly in search looks like a large target.
I'm not sure why you remember MS the way you do. There was a much much larger barrier for consumers to move to a different OS. If you owned a PC you pretty much had to run Windows. And MS made it extremely difficult to use a non-IE browser in the OS.
That doesn't mean I think they're innocent in all things but I don't see how their search market share is a monopoly target.
As an analogy, during my childhood days when photocopiers came out in India they were mostly Xerox machines. So Xerox became a verb and has stayed a verb to this day. So much so that you will find "Xerox shops"[1] in all Indian cities and people won't understand what a photocopier shop is :-)
That didn't work for Microsoft back then either
I mean, at the tail end of that period even South Park was lampooning the reliability of Windows. A lot of Google’s products work very well and dependably (well, provided they don’t murder the product), which maybe isolates them from that synergistic hate.
People hated Microsoft. Remember blue screens of death? Clippy? Developing for IE?
I even know a local Swedish podcaster that actively say DuckDuckGo instead of Google when relating to search. I completely understand this because I totally agree with the concept that Google has become politicized like a lot of companies unfortunately have become.