[indygreg2]

If I were the product manager of a search engine and our chief competitor had an offering (411) that we didn't (at least branded in our name) and the cost to deploy said offering was cheap (because we already had one very similar due to a recent acquisition), wouldn't it be worth the relatively trivial investment (from a large company's perspective) to deploy said offering? Even if it were for reasons of "me too," so what? I believe most brand managers would reach the same conclusion, especially if the costs were low.

Furthermore, does the track record not show that Microsoft re-brands (assimilates) its acquisitions eventually? How do you (or the author of the linked post) know that the deployment of a Microsoft-branded 411 service was not part of this process?

Finally, everyone in the speech recognition industry knows that it requires a large sample set (utterances) to refine a speech recognition engine. If you are building one from scratch (Google), you will do anything and everything in your power to collect utterances. To think that Microsoft and everyone else in the industry did not recognize what Google was doing with GOOG-411 is preposterous.

[sixcorners]

Given the article that someone cited in their reply to me on this comments page that said that Google has been launching it's product in many forms since October 2006, it still seems possible that they made the decision to buy that company because of Google's actions. As far as everyone knowing what Google was doing, I don't think that is true. Didn't a lot of people think that they were really just trying to get into the 411 business? I mean before they actually launched the product in their labs thing and stated their intention.