Wouldn't playing possum entail Brin not expressing his opinion?

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They are digging their own grave bitching about MSFT. Serge can look forward to his company run by a bunch of antitrust lawyers pretty soon.

Every move they make will need to be "approved" by the laywers who need to interpret a bunch of vague laws and rules.

Want to add a spell checker to Google? Can't do that because you'll wipe out all of the little spell checker software makers and they'll say you're extending your monopoly. You can try buying them all up, but it turns out that entrepreneurs figure out this gig pretty quick and you'll find that everything you want to do by a strange coincidence has a dozen companies that are doing the same thing and are complaining to the govt about your evil empire.

Maybe you should ask folks at--GASP!--Microsoft about what they might have done differently to keep the govt out of their lives for a little while longer. I bet they wish they positioned themselves differently than they did.

The shoe fits. Google refuses to wear it at its own peril. Better to get in front of this problem and try to effect the outcome vs. keeping your head in the sand and hoping it will go away. It won't. Human nature hasn't changed in the ten years since MSFT was in this position.

ReversePundit

First, I'm not sure how MS acquiring Yahoo would affect IE's market share. At one time, his statement was true, and Microsoft did indeed use their weight to produce websites designed for IE and their OS market share to drive IE adoption. After the antitrust suits, IE has become less integrated with Windows, and even msn.com renders correctly in Firefox.

Predicting something that already happened is bad enough, but when the extension of that prediction applies to Google--yes, haunt him in the future is the right description. Is this really any different from Google wanting to control search, email, and word processors/spreadsheets? Google pushing web based apps is just the Web 2.0 version of MS pushing IE. Google may not have market share, now, but IE was once a joke when compared to Mosaic/Netscape.

Oh, sorry, I forgot: Google does no evil. My bad.

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Arnaud H

Patricia2