I want to be clear about something, because I don't want this to get taken out of context when Google stock goes up in the future, which I fully expect it will. *I'm bullish on Google and currently have over $10,000 invested in the company in my growth portfolio*.   In terms of Google losing this battle, it's about positioning. Google is already the dominant market leader in search with high margins. This means that they do not have any room for market share gain, and they don't have room to improve margins, in this specific situation, battling Microsoft's Bing, the best they can hope for is to defend their existing business and economics. Microsoft is in a much more advantageous position to force Google into altering their products of their core business in hopes to gain incremental market share.