"The point isn't that they haven't had successess"
I just don't choose to short change and dismiss them so quickly.
In the world of data bases the ongoing quest for suprmacy among IBM's DB, SQL and Oracle has only been cause for improvement in all three competitors.
Competition is good. :-)
No one has argued competition is bad... I have argued that when it comes to internet strategy and in particular search MS is basically a "me too" and always will be.