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Seeking $335,000 in unpaid advertising bills, Google Inc. filed suit against a small Internet site in Ohio in October. The complaint was so routine it was just two sentences long.  Google never expected the response it got. Last month, the small Internet site countered with a 24-page antitrust lawsuit against Google, accusing the search-engine giant of a litany of monopolistic abuses.

“My reaction was, ‘What the heck is this?’ ” says Mark Sheriff, an Ohio attorney who represents Google, speaking of the involvement of Mr. Rule and his powerhouse law firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, whose antitrust practice is based in Washington, D.C. “It’s not every day that a big D.C. law firm like Cadwalader gets involved in a collections lawsuit in Ohio.”

To Google, the pattern is clear: It contends Microsoft is embarking on a proxy war against it through various apparently unrelated cases, preparing the ground for a broader antitrust assault of some sort on Google’s dominance in the online world. “It’s become clear that our competitors are scouring court dockets around the world looking for complaints against Google into which they can inject themselves, learn more about our business practices, and use that information to develop a broader antitrust complaint against us,” said a Google spokesman, Adam Kovacevich.

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More from the Wall Street Journal article.

Microsoft says it’ll put a plastic bag over the head of the multiheaded old Windows version monster (more here).

From here this looks like a pretty smart move to get the world onto their only currently competitive operating system platform.  But I wonder how much love this’ll garner from their user community.

From Josh Topolsky of Engadget:

• This really is a completely new OS — and not just Microsoft's new OS, it's a new smartphone OS, like webOS new, like iPhone OS new. You haven’t used an interface like this before (well, okay, if you;ve used a Zune HD then you've kind of used an interface like this).

Here’s the rest of his Windows Phone 7 Series hands-on and impressions article.

This one from the New York Times is getting killer press in tech circles.  We’re all always trying to understand why a company like Apple can consistently innovate while another one with more than ample resources cannot.

Case in point: Microsoft.  Every one of us has been somehow touched by Microsoft products, yet almost no one considers anything outside perhaps the first release of Windows or even Windows 95 as somehow innovative (and even those were also-rans to Apple technology since I brought them up).

Seventeen year Microsoft VP Dick Brass (he left in 2004) seems to have as good an angle as any into why innovation is absolutely counterintuitive to Microsoft culture:

Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world, and the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers, the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers.

• “…early in my tenure, our group of very clever graphics experts invented a way to display text on screen called ClearType. It worked by using the color dots of liquid crystal displays to make type much more readable on the screen. Although we built it to help sell e-books, it gave Microsoft a huge potential advantage for every device with a screen. But it also annoyed other Microsoft groups that felt threatened by our success.  Engineers in the Windows group falsely claimed it made the display go haywire when certain colors were used. The head of Office products said it was fuzzy and gave him headaches. The vice president for pocket devices was blunter: he’d support ClearType and use it, but only if I transferred the program and the programmers to his control. As a result, even though it received much public praise, internal promotion and patents, a decade passed before a fully operational version of ClearType finally made it into Windows.”

Several other reasons are cited, including risk and the antitrust issues of the late nineties, so you’ll want to click the link above and read the full article at NYT.

And you think your company has culture issues.

For the last two years a segment of the press has worked to keep their eyes on the real long term focus for Apple: their under-the-covers intellectual property.  Not just the software, rather the battery life and more importantly the CPU.  And if the Apple iPad is any indicator, Apple’s purchase of fabless chipmaker PA Semi could be the greatest acquisition any company’s made over the last decade.  That’s right: any company.

Here’s what we know: the iPad is a flamethrower.  It’s nasty fast.  So fast the iPad’s speed is often the first thing anyone who’s touched it mentions.  It’s great to see software and interface guys like John Gruber talk in detail about the iPad’s blazing performance.  When that happens, you know it’s hot.

As Gruber also points out, what’s scary for the competition now is not the package Apple’s put together with this device.  Frankly, Apple’s competitors have spent well over two years being scared and trying anything to catch up or differentiate.  No, what’s got to keep the also-rans up at night is the beginning of the end of the battles on the commodity hardware market.  They used to compete with Apple to be the first to market with the fastest devices, and nowhere has this been more visible and critical than the mobile processor sector.  With Apple’s A4 mobile CPU serving as the iPad’s engine (and companies like Intel and Samsung on the outside looking in), the game has changed forever.

The ‘real’ Web 2.0 and Internet 3.0 begin and end with mobile devices, and that’s why Apple now touts itself as the largest mobile device company in the world.  It can’t be overstated: the mobile industry is now firmly positioned to completely supplant every computing technology we’ve created and used to this point.  The iPhone and App Store set the table, and future devices will drive the hole ever more open.  Starts to make Apple’s acquisition of mobile ad firm Quattro Wireless look pretty smart, doesn’t it?

Even if Apple’s competitors come within shouting distance of their technological advantages on the software front (and some might say Google Android and Palm WebOS are in fact in that ballpark), Apple’s ability to deliver far superior processor performance means a massive advantage every time you try these devices head-to-head in the future.

More importantly it raises the performance ceiling dramatically for Apple, meaning their ability to drive more ‘wow’ features into iPhone OS will far exceed what the Googles, Palms, Nokias, and Microsofts of the world will be able to achieve.

This is a one horse race unless another entrant steps up and attempts to change the game rules.

The Register reports one of Microsoft’s former software distributors is accusing it of offering sex and drugs on a company-held cruise for its partners.  After being jilted, the partner states their highly lucrative relationship was terminated.

Wow.  First time I’ve heard of a company requiring drugs and sex.

Of course none of this has been proven in a court of law and it does seem a little fishy, but it makes for a whacky story.

In this article Jim Goldman offers some interesting tidbits provided to him on the DL, including these highlights:

• Steve Jobs “hates” Google CEO and former Apple board member Eric Schmidt (hard to believe this one, honestly)
• Apple wants Microsoft’s Bing search API because they don’t want to build search in house
• Apple will use Bing’s search API alongside their own ad system, which came in part from their recent Quattro Wireless acquisition

Goldman goes on to say he believes Apple will actually build their own search system because they feel they need nothing less than what Google’s already built to control the Internet ecosystem running inside their hardware and operating systems.

I tend to believe Goldman’s right in the long term.  Since this capability takes years to build, Microsoft Bing is a great stopgap that gets them off the Google train while they still command an amazing lead on the industrial design front, where no one – especially Google – even comes close to touching them.

Probably not, but who knows.  Don’t forget, the Google Nexus is HTC-developed hardware with the Google brand on it.  That’s not exactly the same approach Apple takes in developing literally every aspect of the devices they sell from hardware to software.

And it probably means there’ll only be close competition until anyone else dedicates themselves completely to doing it the Apple way.

But don’t hold your breath.

Mac Observer’s take can be found here.

Om Malik brilliantly asserts that Motorola should be in the conference room working out a deal for Palm.  It’s simple: they need a great mobile OS and the only two competitive options are Palm WebOS and Windows Mobile.

Then again, this time next year Windows Mobile won’t be competitive so that leaves Palm.

Go for it, MOTO.  It’s this or perhaps the end of your mobile business.

So What Should Motorola Do Now? – GigaOM.

This attempt at copying Apple is even worse than the Microsoft Store concept.  Then again, nobody has any idea what Apple’s going to unveil later this month.  It’s just sad the furthest their vision takes them is a recycled tablet named a “slate” to preemptively rip off Apple’s most likely product name.

Where’s the innovation?

Microsoft’s Slate: Exactly Unlike Apple’s Upcoming Tablet.