Software - MSFT taking aim at Google?
Prompted by this report about a web crawler called MSNBot, Dave Winer investigates and posts this anonymous email that says it's so. Interesting, in light of the rumours about a possible Google IPO (which Google's co-founder had earlier denied). Here's another recent story from C/Net on the subject.

Now, I'm no lover of Microsoft. But they're perfectly within their rights to compete against Google. And Google needs to take a page from Intuit's book: the only way to defeat MS in head-to-head competition is to continually out-innovate them and then delight your customers better and more often than they do - because MS will surely out-spend you, out-work you, and out-market you. But it can be done; you just have to be (to steal someone else's phrase) insanely great.

Of course, if you are, they may just turn around and buy you. And the government's probably not going to step in to prevent it this time.