I'm a fan of google. I always have been actually, ever since they came on the scene. They have a good search engine with a nice interface and I don't have to see the annoying ads of MSN or Yahoo. They also have a bunch of extra tools that can be quite useful. I switched to google maps from mapquest long ago, and I very much enjoy using their "office suite" which is all online and easily accessible from multiple computers. With that being said a recent news item just came out that in my opinion has them looking like a bunch of crybabies, especially after only a few days earlier they were cited as last on the list of companies when it comes to privacy protection.

The recent news item is that they are lashing out against Microsoft and its new search tool incorporated into Windows Vista. They say that the product is difficult to turn off and therefore violates the anti-trust agreement that Microsoft signed stating that the company would make it easier for competing companies to write programs that run on the operating system. Anyone who has used any version of Windows knows that their search tool is severely lacking. If you wanted to find something in the past, you may as well search and come back after supper to find the results. With Vista they have beefed their search engine up and now if you are searching in an area of your hard drive that is indexed you will get super fast results. Google offers a desktop search tool that does the exact same thing, it indexes your hard drive and allows you to search.

Now I understand what google is trying to get at, I mean they have a product that they created to fill a hole that was in the old versions of Windows and now Microsoft has fixed the hole and they're realizing that their product isn't quite as needed anymore. The problem is their complaining about it instead of doing what google usually does best which is create a better product. Not to mention their argument is completely wrong and actually faulty logic. If you wanted to use google's desktop search you could still do so whether or not Window's Vista search was turned off. So why is it relevant that it is difficult to turn off (the truth is that I tried today and it took me 3 to 4 mouse clicks to turn it off which really isn't all that difficult). Also by default Microsoft's search only indexes your programs and your documents folder, which means if you would rather use google for everything else by all means, if you really want to use google for everything, by all means, if you want to turn off Microsoft's by all means, and if you want to have Microsoft's do everything by all means.

The long story short is that Microsoft created something good in Windows Vista and google is complaining because they got beat out for once. I think they need to get over themselves and get back to what they do best: innovating.