[cygwin98]

I think Bing is a lost battle. The real question is what can they do on Azure, and can they move people to a cloud-based Office suite.

Bing is actually doing surprisingly well, considering the team competes with probably the most successful department and the foundation of GOOG. IMHO it's likely one of very few successful strategic moves of MSFT in competitive markets. Without Bing, GOOG would pretty much print money and pour money on whatever futuristic projects they feel like. Oh, well, they're already doing these stunts, it would only get worse without Bing. Azure and Office-in-the-cloud alone cannot compete with freebies backed by big pockets.

Creating another browser that everyone needs to optimize their websites for separately - not so great.

I agree on the pains caused by browser fragmentation, but I do think it's still a good thing to have IE especially the new versions around. The recent move of GOOG pushing for Dart is a dangerous sign that GOOG is starting to flex its muscle and do whatever they want. Mozilla alone stands no chance in such a challenge, in a same sense they couldn't in a battle against MSFT about 2 decades ago.

[skalkin]

"Without Bing, GOOG would pretty much print money and pour money on whatever futuristic projects they feel like. "

You say it like Google's futuristic projects are bad things; if anything, we need more of them!

[tcheard]

Exactly, I don't see a downside in Google pouring money at futuristic projects. This is a good thing, their research and development only helps the computing industry. I guess people are just stuck in the mindframe that everything Google does is bad. Sure they seem to do some sketchy stuff sometimes with personal information, but that doesn't mean everything they do is a bad thing.

[gress]

They are bad things if they empower an ever more powerful monopoly.

[bduerst]

Nitpick: Not all monopolies are bad (utilities, transportation, etc.)

The term you're thinking of is conglomerate, because Google has at least one competitor in every one of it's markets, which isn't a monopoly.

[gress]

Nitpick: legally a monopoly doesn't require zero competitors.

[bduerst]

> Legally

Only when getting fined for antitrust or monopolistic behavior, which doesn't mean it is a monopoly - only that a regulating body is trying to prevent it from eventually becoming one.

Definitively, mono-poly means one entity in the market.

[gress]

I understand the etymology, however using that as a basis for reasoning is unhelpful since it's the legal and economic consequences in real-life that actually mean something.

[klipt]

> freebies backed by big pockets

That also describes Bing.

> The recent move of GOOG pushing for Dart is a dangerous sign that GOOG is starting to flex its muscle and do whatever they want.

How exactly is Dart dangerous? It's open source, unlike C#.

[cygwin98]

How exactly is Dart dangerous? It's open source, unlike C#.

One nit to pick here: C# is open sourced, though the .NET framework is not. Anyway, let's focus our discussion on Dart.

Somehow I had an impression that GOOG might have a plan B that would push Dart to replace JS on the web and Java on the mobile and a walled-garden that unifies current ChromeAppStore and PlayStore. JS would be totally marginalized and obsoleted. I'm not a fan of JS, but throwing away the enormous efforts done for the past decade is too much a churn and waste for me to swallow. I could hopefully be totally wrong though.

[klipt]

Tons of Google's client side code is in javascript ... I don't know why you think they'd obsolete their own code.