The constant sarcastic nastiness that the Inquirer spouts, whilst amusing initially, does eventually wear...

Please pray tell, what is the purpose of this?

Google is better known as the company that fails at everything except search. that the only way to get people to use them is to force them down people's throats or in this case spam. Look at buzz. a total failure which suddenly showed up on gmail (like spam) (the only successful google product other than search). wave is a failure. google docs is also a failure even after heavy promoting on their site even more so now that MS entered with better fidelity office web apps. It failed to displace office, it is severly underpowered and it makes no money. youtube is a money drain.

google is frantically scrambling to find other revenue streams and it finds none. It needs to grow its market share in order to grow but it can't advance further due to bing. google literaly has no plans for growth other than throwing badly cooked projects at the wall and seeing what sticks.

so it is incorrect to think google has little to worry about about bing or apple. It wouldn't take much to knock them off their only revenue model: ads. All it takes is for microsoft and apple to ship adblock plus like technlogy to kill google's only cash cow. Or for MS or apple to lock out google from mobile ads. Or just like google replaced yahoo, another start up could come and out do them.

Google's future remains in doubt with an OS that makes no money from sales and even if it outstrips the iphone of its market share, anti-trust regulators will not let them bundle google products with it for long just like it happened to MSFT.

So the start of the post-google world is not far away and that's ok because they were better as just a search engine company that people liked instead of this microsoft 2.0 googleliath of company that wants to spam you with ads every chance it gets. good riddance I say.

... may I say how pleasant it is to read a commentary on the Inquirer that is insightful, critical, even biting that doesn't undermine it's own credibility with nasty, ad hominem flame-bait insults directed at the companies its discussing and the customers of those companies

Last I heard, Android was behind even Microsoft for mobile OS market share. It may be growing faster, but its got a long way to go.

And as for Microsoft and Apple shuffling desk chairs, its an apt analogy for Microsoft, maybe, but Apple's wave hasn't even begun to crest. As long as their "closed" systems continue to reek of excellence, then their business model will continue to prosper even against the choice of more open models.

Bill wrote:
2) Google's Android is (now has more market share than Apple's iPhone).

Get a CLUE Bill. Why do people feel the need to comment, when they obviously know nothing about the topic?

Why must people read way too much into this stuff? This article is 100% anal overboard over-cooked over and over and over.

Oh, and yes, the search engine in selectable on iOS 4.

1) Microsoft's "Windows phone 7" is no threat in the mobile space.

2) Google's Android is (now has more market share than Apple's iPhone).

3) Google and Microsoft both have search engines, while Apple does not.

4) Surprise: Microsoft Bing is let into the walled garden.

However, I think that it is nice to see both Microsoft and Apple aboard the sinking ship of proprietary closed-source software. This makes it a very clear choice for consumers: either they support autocracy and allow themselves to be controlled and manipulated by control-happy companies and proprietary software, or they opt for openness and the ability to control their own use of their purchased devices.

I hope Apple and Microsoft have fun frantically shuffling the deck chairs as they go under.

...please learn the difference between "it's" and "its".

Phone me when you're done.

Can users select a different search engine for the phone to use? I hope so. Otherwise that would be annoying, and probably make the Europeans refer it for legal assessment.

This is how you spell iPhone.