People have said for a long time now the big fight for the computing world is between Google and Microsoft. Probably easier to say Google and Microsoft are bitter rivals, among many others who vie for being people's default choices for how specific things are done. Today, the Times reported that Microsoft is going to make changes to Vista to allow users a choice of desktop search engines, in response to Google's complaints that Vista doesn't currently allow such things with ease.
A good idea, or on the same level as the editions of Vista and XP that don't include Windows Media Player? Depends on how it's implemented: when they revised XP to make it that much easier to integrate a third-party browser into the system, one of the things that irked me was not that they did it, but that the interface used to select which browser (if any) or which media player (if any) to use with Windows was amazingly unintuitive. The cynic in me is convinced they did that on purpose, to dissuade people from ever bothering with it. If they just re-use the existing interface for such choices, at least I won't have to dig around in yet another window to find out how to do it.
Plus, I'd like to see how well Google's desktop search engine replaces Microsoft's -- like, for instance, if it just snaps into the existing search infrastructure in Vista instead of creating a whole new set of interfaces I have to re-learn. If MS makes it that much easier to do that, great. (For what it's worth, I've become quite dependent on the Vista indexed search system; it's saved my bacon more than a few times when I couldn't find something that I knew was somewhere in my mess of files. People are not born organizers, and having a PC to take care of at least some of that work is a good part of what they're for.)
In sum: How they do it is going to be even more important than the fact that they're doing it at all.
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