Did you miss the early 2000s when we were all on Slashdot which headed every Microsoft story with Bill Gates in a Borg costume? Of course people accuse Microsof

Did you miss the early 2000s when we were all on Slashdot which headed every Microsoft story with Bill Gates in a Borg costume? Of course people accuse Microsoft, we've been accusing Microsoft since before Google existed. If you did miss that time because it's outside of your time in the tech world, the difference here is that Microsoft never claimed to be anything but a B2B software dealer with a passing fascination with extending its monopoly to the consumer markets. It tried cable TV boxes, phones, and all sorts of other hare brained ideas but the Xbox was the only one that really stuck. Google PR image'd itself as the anti-Microsoft. No feature creep, just a plain white page that showed you what you wanted to find. Features in the core search product were subtle and generally high on usefulness and low on intrusiveness. Even the Google ad business was marketed as the acceptable compromise between the brain-melting strobe light ads of the late 90s and the word-based ads that people would not object to. tl;dr: Google had to work at burning all of its bridges.