This is kind of a silly article you realize as soon as you see, "there is one market where Microsoft's doggedness has failed to pay off: search".Search is not a market it is a free service and the revenue comes from ads, not from doing searches. Owning a comprehensive web search service also enables research and data mining to do research like Google's "Ghost in the Browser" white paper that identifies Microsoft's IE+Windows as the chosen target of web viruses by analyzing their designs across the board. And of course part of the technology helps you pick good choices for ads to adorn a given web page.Microsoft has not done well in the portal space. MSN is not so hot and Microsoft Live did not really catch on. Admittedly, it is hard to create an enduring web portal that actually makes money. The only one that comes to mind that has done a super job of both is Apple's iTunes.Yes, iTunes has thrived for half a dozen years and counting, making tons of money each year, being wildly successful, and harnessing lots of web technologies under its hood. It is a done deal though. Other kinds of portals like iTunes could be created. Music/podcasts is a done deal now but other kinds of commerce or service portals could be created that are profitable and long lived.Microsoft Live Search was not such a big deal. Renaming it Bing and hyping it got a surge of gawkers that then declined somewhat. Microsoft Mobile market share is tiny compared to Apple iPhone market share, and Apple only introduced their product 2 years ago.Maybe Microsoft needs web search and its costs could be offset by some advertising that does not increase the attack surface of pages to web browsers. Microsoft's security/maintenence groups need to be trawling the web constantly to find web viruses and Trojans that target MS-Windows, or that have infected MS-Windows servers. Web based ads do not seem like a good primary revenue generator for Microsoft, though.Xbox took half a decade to turn a profit. It is profitable now but for years it was losing the company money. The iPhone dominated its market in about a quarter of that time and had no problem being profitable almost immediately. The iPod and Apple iTunes online music sales were similarly successful.IE seems like a big cost center not a revenue center. it is probably costing Microsoft Windows sales - exactly the opposite of what it was supposed to do. Many customers are harmed every day while using it and it complicates IT workers' chores and developers' duties.The computer software division generates a lot of income but it has taken a huge hit throughout this year and that is a big part of the reason Microsoft's workforce is being pared down a lot. Windows 7 was a shot in the arm financially but technologically, it has not strengthened the product itself in its weakest areas. The software division still rakes in well over a billion in profits and it is the heart of Microsoft.Google does a lot of stuff that provides valuable service to Microsoft's Windows customers. Google has yet to sell or even give an OS away and it seems dubious that Google Docs applications are eviscerating Microsoft's MS Office revenue.One of the oddest characteristics of Google's ads is they don't attack web browsers such as IE when they display. They don't contain Flash - so no Flash exploits. They do not show any images (hopefully, they do not contain invisible ones) so they don't present a risk of JPG/WMF/GIF/etc. OS/browser programming flaw exploits. Ads often increase the amount of threat on a web page - Google Adsense ads seem like they have very little intrinsic threat. So, Google has actually helped lower risk for Microsoft's customers and reduced ill will to Microsoft. When was the last time you heard about an enterprise getting attacked by malware from an Adsense ad?Google has not attacked the integrity of Microsoft's software products - other things have. Google has not attacked Microsoft's customers - other entities have. Google has not made Microsoft's software more expensive to use - other things have. Google has not put pressure on Microsoft to fix certain bugs very quickly - other things have.From keeping up on the industry news, it seems like the premises of the article are wrong. Google is not Microsoft's worst enemy. Google is one of the companies propping Microsoft up - the biggest and the strongest to do it quite so directly, ignoring Windows OEMs which are its biggest customers now and traditionally.That is where a rival would attack and destroy Microsoft. That relationship between Microsoft and the Windows OEMs is their Achilles heal. Microsoft has not favored it much in the past month. They're directly competing with the OEM's on direct retail operations, and at the same time calling OEM customizations/freebies crapware or the like and characterizing their own equivalent in glowing terms. They're dis-ing the OEMs and Google didn't make them do it.While it is probably true Microsoft craves the ad revenue that powers Google, there are more ways to make money than taking or supplanting something that already exists and does it in a way that helps you. Actually, creating products once again would be a good start. Microsoft offered lots of new software products to consumers in the 1990's but pare them down in the 2000's. Maybe it needs some new "compelling applications". Where is the killer app for MS-Windows for the 2000's from Microsoft?Most of Microsoft's ills at this moment are a direct result of it attacking platform neutral technologies, trying to take them over or kill them off. The way Microsoft has done that have jeopardized its users, its customers, and the safety of using its platform. Ironically, platform neutral media - the web, the Internet, music CD ROMs, and USB memory CDs have each vigorously attacked MS-Windows in the past 1-4 years. The job of protecting the user from communications/storage media has languished and so has the creation of killer apps for the "personal computer" user.Microsoft's worst enemy is that it picks the wrong things as its worst enemy, while its OS gets owned by everything users commonly connect to a PC except the KVM & mouse! How could they not notice this?There are many markets that failed to pay off and this article has missed a lot of points about Microsoft, the web, and web searching/advertising.