[vrandom]

I don't think it's fair to turn the Bing vs Wave previews into this kind of corporate comparison. Bing is being released to try and gain MS a good double digit market in a billion dollar industry. It is little more than a clone because that is all that a search engine can realistically be with current technology.

Sure innovation is great. That's why we're all at HN right?! But the big money (short of creating a whole new industry) is about getting market share in established markets. That is what MS are doing - from Bing to Silverlight to Xbox to most other things they do. Nothing more or less.

[citrik]

I think it's driven more by their respective business models. Google is more focused on incubating fresh ideas and growing those ideas into the next established market where as Microsoft tends to reiterate on accepted ideas, Market the @%#* out of it, and our favorite (step 3) profit.

Why is it that the big money is there to eek out a Nth of a percent but not available for fresh big ideas? I'm not at all disagreeing with you, I just think that's an interesting point. I wish the world were the other way around it might be a better place (or maybe there'd just be less "big money" for having tried). Maybe if MS let smaller groups run wild more often they'd see more of these elusive "innovative ideas".