It really isn’t inconceivable that they wouldn’t have got funding from somewhere else. It was a marketing opportunity for Google, them being the David to Microsoft’s Goliath. Remember that whole ”don’t be evil” thing? Turns out it was jusy a ruse to be abandoned once the market had consolidated.
There is also an argument that back in the day Firefox saved Google rather than the other way around.
Why? Because when Microsoft had 90% browser share, gained through tying IE directly into Windows, there was a very real chance that they could have adapted IE so that it was harder to use Google than a default MS Bing search engine.
Having a better, cross-platform alternative to IE allowed Google to stay in the game and make use of FF's cutting edge features.
Remember the old Microsoft was quite happy to cripple Windows to kill it's competitors. For example "Windows ain't done until WordPerfect won't run" and the weird "errors" you saw if you tried running Windows on top of DR DOS.
I'm not sure that adds up. When Bing was introduced in mid-2009, IE had about 60% of the market, and it was dropping fast as Chrome's popularity exploded [1].
I believe that Microsoft’s interest in Google’s business predates the launch of Bing. You can replace the brand name “Bing” with “some kind of search/advertising/internet gateway” business.
Remember Microsoft used to be a very competitive outfit with a history of using their dominance of desktop OSs to enter new markets.
It’s easy to forget that Microsoft of old were able to keep bankrolling loss leaders to “cut off the oxygen”[1] of any market that they saw as threatening Windows.
I think you’d find most of the court proceedings under Novell vs Microsoft.
If memory serves me correctly Novell believed in their case enough to take it to the US Supreme Court but were not given leave to proceed further. No reason/justification was given for that.
it's not inconceivable is a common enough phrase. You could say this might be more parsimoniously expressed as "it is conceivable", but the colloquial phrasing intones that the premise proceeds specifically from the supposition that it may be inconceivable.
It really isn’t inconceivable that they wouldn’t have got funding from somewhere else. It was a marketing opportunity for Google, them being the David to Microsoft’s Goliath. Remember that whole ”don’t be evil” thing? Turns out it was jusy a ruse to be abandoned once the market had consolidated.