> They're sitting comfortably in their search advertising castle, and playing guerrilla warfare everywhere else.

Don't ever think Google is playing guerrilla warfare just to poke fun at the other guys while sitting on a pile of cash. The reason Google is attacking these companies is simple: they have become clear threats to Google's core business - not search, but targeted advertising on the web. Apple's race to dominance to the mobile space with its walled-garden approach and app- and vertical-search-based model were threatening the whole open, web-based and ads-driven model; Microsoft's stronghold on browser market with an ancient browser was holding the web hostage and killing the potential of web as a service serving platform; Facebook keeps valuable information that is not accessible to Google bot and may even be able to develop the next big thing to replace search, not to mention that it is sucking the best talent; and it has been very clear that local advertising is where the future growth of targeted advertising will be from.

Google is being offensive and aggressive, and they are not comfortable about it when their core business - not search but serving ads - is being threatened.

They're also making a lot of enemies in the progress. They run the risk as well of being perceived to be getting stale which has plagued MS for the past decade. A potential mounting list of failures doesn't help a reputation.