I think it's worse with Google, honestly. It might be that I simply wasn't able to analyze Microsoft much during their heyday (generally too young), and I'm not saying it is necessarily /much/ worse, but at least in the theory of this model I'm using, it certainly seems worse; like, I blame Google more for their actions than I do for Microsoft.

Microsoft wanted to win, and in so doing was brutal in their attempts to control things and take over segments of new markets; and when things do fail, they either doubled down or shut them down pretty quickly. They were a fierce competitor, but they actually wanted to make money.

Google, on the other hand, seems to just stumble around, kind of clumsily and seemingly even accidentally tripping over entire markets. At no point do they attempt to make money, and their involvement often seems trite: releasing something, and then never updating it again.

It's like no one at Google ever cared about making money with the new thing they launched, and sometimes they don't even seem to care if it "succeeds" or "fails": if you talk to them they kind of shrug the notion off as if they just wanted to build it, or maybe they needed it for Google internally and decided to let the world benefit from it.

The result is a ton of stuff that is nigh unto intentionally poorly maintained that, due to having access to Google's index, or Google's infrastructure, or simply Google's warchest, manages to be "the king of the market", despite any other shortcomings it has.

In fact, the only situation I can come up with quickly where this happened with Microsoft was Internet Explorer 6; where, for whatever reason, they seem to just stop working on the project. (You could then argue that, retrospectively, IE3-5 was "part of the problem" for being free, but I think that was actually "mostly ok"; I'd find the argument interesting, though.)

In comparison, Google has tons of projects (or at least did, before this year), where I've seen startups with "better stuff" get devoured by something for which I don't even see an attempt at a business model from Google (and then which they often never update again).

My favorite example is actually Google Voice, because some of the competition in that space is so good that they can actually convince people to buy it even though Google Voice is free; some have better transcription, some have better group features, and some are simply easier to use.

However, the price points are whack, as are the economies of scale; each of these players is playing in a tiny little market that almost no one will ever hear of, because their competitor (Google) is seriously just bleeding money: giving people phone numbers and forwarding arbitrarily long calls, for free.

(edit:)

Thinking about it more, Wave did seem to me quite a bit like Microsoft: a ton of companies I had seen that previously were looking at doing collaborative things heard that Google was releasing Wave "someday", decided "Google will win" and that to survice they needed to "interop", in so doing got involved in a beta program that lasted seemingly forever, and after it was actually on the market for a rather short period of time, Google scrapped the whole thing. <- Classic Microsoft

But the effects of that were then only "a couple years", and during those years Google threw tons of marketing and engineering effort at the project; when Google did decide to exit, they did so rapidly: there was no "extended sunset period" where Wave continued to dominate "by accident". Wasteful? Yes. Annoying? Yes. Google Code or Voice level of unsustainable? No.