Microsoft left little doubt Friday that it was one of the companies leading the charge against Google worldwide.

In a blog post entitled “Competition Authorities and Search,” Microsoft Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner said part of the motivation for Microsoft and Yahoo's search deal was “we are concerned about Google business practices that tend to lock in publishers and advertisers and make it harder for Microsoft to gain search volume.” The post comes at the end of a week in which European authorities asked Google to explain its search algorithms after complaints from competitors–one of which is owned by Microsoft.

“Microsoft would obviously be among the first to say that leading firms should not be punished for their success,” Heiner wrote in one of Microsoft's strongest public statements regarding Google to date. “Our concerns relate only to Google practices that tend to lock in business partners and content (like Google Books) and exclude competitors, thereby undermining competition more broadly.”

A Google representative declined to comment on Microsoft's post.

For all the obsession about Google's supposedly deteriorating relationship with Apple, make no mistake: the two most diametrically opposed companies in the tech industry are Microsoft and Google. The two titans are increasingly locked in a struggle to define the next generation of computing.

Microsoft, of course, has two franchises to defend against Google's moves into operating system and office productivity software, as well as the broader philosophy that the Web–rather than the desktop–is the platform of the future. And for all Google's financial might, it remains mostly a one-trick pony with the vast majority of its resources financed by its search dominance: exactly where Microsoft is aiming with Bing and the Yahoo partnership.

via Microsoft takes off gloves against Google | Relevant Results – CNET News.