“Microsoft left little doubt Friday that it was one of the companies leading the charge against Google worldwide,” Tom Krazit reports for CNET.
“In a blog post entitled ‘Competition Authorities and Search,’ Microsoft Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner said part of the motivation for Microsoft and Yahoo’s search deal was ‘we are concerned about Google business practices that tend to lock in publishers and advertisers and make it harder for Microsoft to gain search volume,'” Krazit reports. “The post comes at the end of a week in which European authorities asked Google to explain its search algorithms after complaints from competitors–one of which is owned by Microsoft.”
Krazit reports, “‘Microsoft would obviously be among the first to say that leading firms should not be punished for their success,’ Heiner wrote in one of Microsoft’s strongest public statements regarding Google to date. ‘Our concerns relate only to Google practices that tend to lock in business partners and content (like Google Books) and exclude competitors, thereby undermining competition more broadly.'”
Krazit reports, “It’s personal, too. ‘Novell, when current Google CEO Eric Schmidt was at the helm, was never hesitant about complaining to regulators about Microsoft,’ Heiner wrote. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Schmidt are said to despise one another; according to court documents, Ballmer pledged to ‘f***ing kill Google’ after learning of Google’s plan to hire a key Microsoft engineer in 2005.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Better hang on, for the unmeasurable amount of hypocrisy generated by Microsoft complaining about a company locking-in people in order to stifle competition could easily be enough to rip a hole in the fabric of space and time.