"Microsoft has thrown down its guantlet for Search about 10 times now... and they always land with a unimpressive thud."
Is that what the Netscape people said too?
Don't know, but microsoft's track record of taking over industies is not without failures, and a decade of failure in search puts MS in the search arena equivalent to MS in the personal finance arena.
Quicken still beats MS Money hands down... and thats even after MS got to see every single piece of internal info of quickens back when they were going to buy them out....
With MS history speaks more than anything else, and in this arena, they have a 10 year track record of failure, in spite of trying their darndest not to.
Google has rested on its luarels particularly in traditional searching, but even so, MS is so far behind the curve, I"m not sweating bullets thinking MS is gonna be the next google.