Google Files Complaint Against Microsoft Over Integrated Desktop Search

You read it right. Google has filed an antitrust complaint because Windows Desktop Search is fully integrated in Windows Vista. Google is contending that Microsoft has now established an unfair advantage over the Google Desktop Search product. Google, in its complaints to U.S. federal and state prosecutors, maintained further that consumers who try to use its search tool on computers running Windows Vista were frustrated because Vista has a competing desktop search program that cannot be turned off. When the Google and Vista search programs are run simultaneously on a computer, their indexing programs slow the operating system. As a result, Google said, Vista violated Microsoft’s 2002 antitrust settlement which prohibits Microsoft from designing operating systems that limit the consumer product choices.

So far, state prosecutors have declined to carry forward the Google complaint. Lucky for Microsoft then that some sanity still exists among the denizens of the halls of justice.

Microsoft has always offered Windows (at least from Windows 95 onward) with integrated hard drive indexing and search functions. Previous to Windows Vista, the desktop search features were endlessly criticized variously for their inanity, slowness and frequent ineffectiveness. That the legions of consumers who've complained now have exactly what they asked for - a fast, accurate, easy to use desktop search engine - seems to matter little to Google.

In fact, in this situation Google seems bent on promoting its own interests even though any abject moron can figure out that Microsoft has merely invested millions to improve a feature that was already integrated. That Google might think consumers (and prosecutors) are too stupid to figure that out is less arch than it is directly insulting to all concerned.

Take a pill Google. We're on to you. You're trying to develop your own platform. That's okay. That's terrific actually. But you need an existing computer and operating system in order to do so. Bite Microsoft once too often over what is clearly an arrogantly self-serving and demanding whine, and you risk awakening the wrath of a sleeping giant. You can't have it both ways - building a business based on someone else's operating system, and then complaining when every single possible door in that operating system isn't thrown wide open for your profitable corporate enjoyment.

Google's attitude has been galling in many situations. This is only the latest Google foray to leave a bad aftertaste and I doubt it will be the last. Google may be proving to be just another big (really big) corporation, driven by all of the shareholder demands, market demands, avarice and greed which drive so many others.