[jaguar]

Yes but...microsoft hires an amazing number of kickass top-of-the-league engineers too.
Google produces cool stuff, no denying that but to me it seems to be coasting on on brandname at the moment rather than any key innovation. Lots of pretty little things and some impressive jscript but nothing that's made me go wow and the quality of searches under it all is not improving as far as I can see. Google have the right idea, they seem to be a few years ahead of most people in terms of where the money is going to be, a company driven by a vision of the future I've only heard from R&D boys but whether they'll pull it off is far from certain. Their method of making money isn't exactly buletproof either, click-fraud is a shit of a problem and their solutions don't strike me as particularly innovative so far. The company is dealing with some of the most complex technical issues one could, whether it'll be able to come up with real solutions I don't know.

Google do have one unique advantage in my eyes, they are probably the only company large enough to implement certain types of machine learning and have sample sizes big enough for it to actually work, I know they are doing work to do with this, I'll be curious to see what comes of it.

Of course I never bought into the whole wank of platforms being better than products so *shrugs*