It is not the best time to strike now, once the timing is right, I am sure they will.

TBH, I consider Google much more evil than Microsoft, in or outside of Dev Circles. Microsoft dropped the evil baton and Google picked it up and sprinted away.

What Microsoft gain after Windows Phone YouTube app case? Nothing. Google successfully fucked up Microsoft.

And I've worked for Google in the past, but their main issue has always been that they change a lot which makes them a moving target which is annoying in its own way.

Microsoft earned its public image and while it's made nicer noises recently it's not an organisation that fills me with trust.

Uh, money? It might not exactly be a noble incentive for a lawsuit, but it's sure as hell an incentive, isn't it?

With a lot of legal issues, sometimes the only winning move is not to play.

They'll get a more level playing field.

CEO's generally don't order this stuff to happen. More often it's a director, manager, VP or whatever that's just really aggressive. Possibly the CEO knew or not.

When a company gets bloodied for a pile of money, they generally have to own up to it, which makes them look bad (by they way, these things do have a cumulative effect) - but more importantly, they have to at very least 'go through the motions' of getting staff to 'not do this stuff'.

So they have 'training' and 'oversight' etc.. However ingrained it is into behaviour (or even a single rotten apple) the likelihood of recursion goes down.

For example - if an inner legal team gets some responsibility for oversight on these issues, they can make life difficult for managers on these things.

I worked at a Fortune 50 that was sued by a patent troll, and it seriously and fundamentally changed internal culture to the point wherein we needed lawyers involved in everything, it was really bad. Obviously a negative example.

But especially Microsoft has enough $ to drag Google into court, they should do it.

That said: I'll bet $100 that MS might be doing some tricky things of their own anyhow.

I'd be curious to see how likely Microsoft would be to follow this approach rather than to just stick to using Blink... as they've already decided to do.

Google could start responding to YouTube requests with binary streams of gibberish if they want, MS would only have standing to sue as a content creator and advertiser on YouTube.

If Google is reverse engineering other browsers optimization paths and putting out content that is disagreeable to that optimization, that's possibly unfortunate but not illegal.

b) since Google's browser became the defacto standard browser thanks to Edge switching engines, hence the thread. The standard doesn't really matter anymore; Google makes most of them now as a matter of course anyway.