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Comment by tysonjennings | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't have happened had they not wasted 6 billion on aQuantive trying to buy their way into search. Google paddled that bottom.

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buy their way into ads you mean. They bought their way into search via the Yahoo deal. and of course Google bought their way into search by paying firefox and others who distributed the google toolbar... everybody tries to do it I guess

"They bought their way into search via the Yahoo deal."

That has only really bore fruit in the US though. MS have less than 5 percent share of search worldwide.

"Google bought their way into search by paying firefox"

Google actually had a larger share of the search market prior to the Firefox deal.

> Google bought their way into search by paying firefox and others who distributed the google toolbar.

Google already owned search when firefox finally had nontrivial market share. They did not "buy their way into search", the transformed the market with an excellent product (Google altavista, the undisputed king until Google came).

At some point, they started paying e.g. mozilla to maintain their position.

But they reached that position based on merit. (A rather uncommon event, unfortunately).

Funny how Eric Schmidt thinks Bing is a huge threat to Google. The corporate spin at the hearings is just too ironic.

http://cnnmoneytech.tumblr.com/post/10483503055/eric-schmidt...

Have you considered the possibility that Schmidt the man actually believes that Bing is competitive with Google and sees this as something to rally against? How is that lying* and spinning? I would consider an executive to be remiss to arrogantly assume that their product is better no matter what. The fact that Schmidt isn't slamming the Bing effort and is actually offering praise should be seen as a good thing. Which CEO was it that laughed at the iPhone when it was released? You seem to be consumed by hate.

*recoiledsnake originally had the word "lying" in his comment. I just noticed he edited that out.

Exactly. Never fully trust the public statements of a corporate exec – they're often smart enough (or stupid enough) to try to be manipulative, either internally or externally and public statements can play both of those sides.

the possibility that Schmidt the man actually believes that Bing is competitive with Google

From a results-based perspective, it more-or-less is. But actually capturing the market is hard to imagine. Search engines in general seem to be reaching the limits of filtering 5 billion pages based on 2 or 3 word queries.

Reminds me of Microsoft's investment in Apple in 1997...

"There was some suggestion that Mr Gates may be anxious to keep Apple afloat to forestall a scenario where, following an Apple demise, a virtual monopoly hold by Microsoft on the software market would inevitably attract negative attention from fair competition regulators in Washington."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/apple-grabs-150m-...

The irony here is that their rescue seems to have worked out a bit too well.

It wasn't a "rescue" it was a lawsuit settlement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company

Apple should invest something back into Microsoft to get them to make Office 2013 for the Mac.

Well, an update to Office 2011 for Mac is being released to add skydrive integration. There are also rumors of iOS and Android versions that will be released, but I guess we'll have to wait and see what actually happens.

The biggest danger for a company the size of Google or Microsoft is complacency. Bing may indeed be a big threat to Google in the long run.

It's just like how Ballmer came out recently railing about how no stone would be left unturned competing with Apple and how MS responded to Linux in the early netbook era. For a global tech company these days you cede nothing. No matter how insignificant Bing may be compared to Google in actuality that doesn't mean Google can afford to go to sleep for a second and they won't.

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