My interviews with journalists about new product rollouts used to conclude (or begin) with a question that, at its essence, asked this: "Who will win, Google or Yahoo!?" Now the attention has turned from that drama to how Google and Microsoft are facing off in the market and, increasingly, in public. An example of the latter was yesterday's widely cited NY Times article (reg. req'd) about Google raising anti-trust issues with the beta release of IE7*
Today there's another NY Times piece about an "arms race" between Google and Microsoft over which one is to become/control "the operating system of the Internet."
Danny Sullivan on the SEW Blog has an extensive post about why this new IE7 release is unlikely to change MSN's search market share, based on history, and why Google is being hypocritical in raising the choice issue with the Justice Dept., given its relationship with Opera and Firefox as the default engine on those browsers.
_______
*I've been using IE7 and it has a lot of nice features, including Firefox-inspired tabbed browsing and RSS. But it crashes on me a great deal (every session). My "default search" provider on IE7 is Yahoo! (which must have been done involuntarily by some piece of Yahoo! software running on my machine). In the upper right there's a pull-down menu that allows users to change search providers. It opens a window and shows the available vendors. I clicked "restore defaults" and Windows Live/MSN was substituted for Yahoo! Yet when I went to the search box Yahoo! was still there. However, the process was relatively straightforward to change engines through a "find more providers" option. Yet it is unlikely that mainstream users would take the time to change providers. Thus Google and Yahoo!'s toolbars become important "weapons" against Microsoft's "default" search strategy.
Screenwerk 