It's Google's Turn on the Hot Seat

You have to forgive Microsoft if it indulges in some schadenfreude today, writes Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times. Archrival Google is facing a peril that’s all too familiar in Redmond. Steve Ballmer can sit back tomorrow as Google’s top execs go before the Senate subcommittee on antitrust, secure in the knowledge that he helped put them there.

Yahoo's Faustian search advertising pact with Google is what caught lawmakers' attention, but Ballmer’s Yahoo machinations are a sideshow, Dudley contends. "Google and Microsoft are warring over which one will be the world's dominant software company. Yahoo's not a contender, it's materiel." After all, no one knows better than Microsoft how much damage antitrust scrutiny can do to a fast-moving tech company. (More Google stories.)