Microsoft vs. Google: The duel on your desktop

Just as a major episode in Microsoft's antitrust saga was winding down, a complaint from its biggest rival threatens to push the company's competitive practices back into the spotlight.
The stage was set by a New York Times report last week that identified Google as the source of a complaint to federal regulators.

Since at least last fall, the search giant has complained privately to the Department of Justice that a desktop search feature built into Windows Vista elbows out competitors and violates the terms of Microsoft's landmark 2001 antitrust settlement with the government.

The legal action will likely play out next in the pages of a joint report due Tuesday from Microsoft and the squad of federal and state government lawyers bird-dogging its compliance with a consent decree stemming from the settlement. The decree spells out what Microsoft must do to remedy its anti-competitive conduct with Windows, the operating-system software installed on more than 90 percent of the world's computers.

A week later, on June 26, the scene will be the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in Washington, D.C. Even if the joint report is silent on the Google complaint, observers expect the judge to broach the issue at a regularly scheduled hearing to monitor the status of the settlement.

The stakes are high. The center of gravity in computing is shifting from the desktop — where Microsoft's Windows monopoly was worth $13.1 billion in sales last year — to the Internet. Companies are competing to attract users to their online services for search, e-mail and other tasks that used to be the purview of desktop software alone.

For Google, a prominent spot for its desktop search tool on Windows PCs can help direct millions of people to its online empire, where it makes billions selling advertising.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Google filed a formal 49-page complaint with the Justice Department in April detailing its concerns with Vista desktop search. That document has not been made public. Microsoft lawyers haven't seen it, either.

Google would not comment beyond a prepared statement that gave a bare outline of its gripe.

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