Makes me smile when people start comparing companies to MS. MS as pointed out haven't been first to market (ie innovating) with any product I can think of (for relatively a long time). Their core product sucks - primarily because of promises they made in the past. If they removed all the legacy crap from windows, they'd be able to make it a damn site more secure. As more and more product areas converge, MS may well come out with something pretty interesting but I suppose we'll all just have to wait and see. But no, G is nothing like MS. They don't exists in many of the same markets, and don't at present have the same predatory business model.
Google is much more flexible than M$FT and I don't think it's fair to compare the two. They're on separate paths if you ask me. I know Microsoft is still ten times bigger than Google and they could drop $1B on anything they chose but look at what a big flop (the new) MSN has been. Google and Linux will crush M$FT. *BTW- where's Longhorn? <added> http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=Google&word2=Microsoft
Wait, in few years, there will be another 'google'. As there has been another 'yahoo' (I mean google).