I can’t help wonder if in the long term, if they will only succeed in making Bing as well as Google, a better search engine. Google is unlikely to allow Microsoft to gain much ground in terms of search engine functionality. Google will inevitably come out with their own parallel implementation of any Microsoft innovation.

Any game of leapfrog, however, is a win, win situation for users. This competition merely serves to illustrate how fundamentally different and complementary the two companies are. At the end of the day, Microsoft, because of it’s historical dependence on it’s own proprietary software will always be vulnerable to Google’s open platform, or platform neutral stance.

It is too early to hazard a guess at this point, whether or not either Bing or Chrome will gain any substantial market share against the overwhelming advantage their rival products currently enjoy.

Let’s see who gains market share over whom, in the search engine and operating system marketplace over the next 10 years. That is a long term outcome that does not require a crystal ball to see clear winners.

So only around 27% of people worldwide have Silverlight installed. Stats for the US are only about 1% more than the worldwide stats.

Compare this to around 2/3 of people with Java installed, and over *97%* with Flash installed.

Silverlight = not supported by most of your users.