Interesting Snippets

Google’s big bonehead play was seen by almost everyone as a great triumph, the latest in a long list of milestones along the way to world domination. Yet it was anything but that. It was a mistake that helped save Microsoft (MSFT), its most dangerous rival, tens of billions of dollars that it can use in its war for supremacy on the Web. It’s a mistake that also infuriated not just Microsoft, but some of the most important institutional investors in the country. And it alerted the American and European governments to Google’s growing omnipotence, leading to numerous expensive and possibly brutal antitrust investigations. Google may spend years recovering from this one terrible error.