Apple Evangelists, Linux enthusiasts, Open Source hackers and many others have been down on Microsoft for years. Yet the more doomsayers predict the end of Microsoft, the more the behemoth's fortunes rise.
DOS was a joke, but hey, they managed to shoehorn Win 3.x onto it. Win 3.x was a joke, but hey, they managed to build Win95 and preserve goodly amount of compatability. Win95 was a joke for serious apps, but hey, WinNT was strong enough it struck fear into the whole Unix sector. The anti-trust suit was going to tear the company apart, but hey, if you wait long enough, administrations change!
Now, the cause celèbre is the rumor that either Microsoft is aiming its big guns at web searching, or doing its damnedest to buy Google. Why? Because MSN search can only find a few measly documents related to Linux, while Google can find a few quadrillion. (Newsflash: Microsoft isn't excising Linux from the universe of discourse. They have a crappy indexer, a crappy crawler, a crappy corpus, or all three.)
Today, via /., we see that Microsoft is launching a newsbot (beta test underway in the UK) to compete with Google News. Fear not -- it is (currently) a warmed over interface to the moreover.com newsfeeds.
Is Microsoft just having a bad month? Or is this an indication that they cannot scale to be the sole provider of all things to all people all the time?
