True, true...
Microsoft makes most of its money from two products, Microsoft
Windows and Microsoft Office. Nearly everything else it makes loses
money, sometimes deliberately. Google makes most of its money from
selling Internet ads next to search results. Nearly everything else it
does loses money, too.
Neither company really cares because
both make so much from their core products that it simply doesn’t
matter. But companies, like people, strive and dream and in this case
both dream, at least sometimes, of destroying the other. Only they
can’t — or won’t — do it in the end, because it is against the
interests of either company to do so.
The vast majority of Google
searches are, of course, done on PCs running Microsoft Windows and
Internet Explorer. It is not in Google’s real interest to displace
these products, which have facilitated so much of its success. Chrome
products are given away, so they bring in no revenue for Google, and
they don’t even provide a better search or advertising experience for
their users, the company admits. So why does Google even bother?
To keep Microsoft on its toes.
...
This makes even more sense given the recent advent of Microsoft’s Bing
search technology, which performs precisely the same competitive
control function against Google. Bing hasn’t a hope of toppling Google
as the premier search engine and Microsoft knows it. To date, Bing’s
success has actually been at the expense of Google’s competitors, not
Google itself.
