Columns

The big news right now is the battle for online superiority. Microsoft's attempts to snare Yahoo have been the subject of speculation, debate and frantic negotiation for weeks, as the search engine fights off the attentions of an unrequited lover and Microsoft acts like it's suddenly remembered the web again after years of relative silence.

Neither company is doing itself any favours. Yahoo looks panicked - never good - and Microsoft looks like it's playing catch-up, which is an embarrassing position for the world's biggest software house to find itself in. Over the years, Microsoft has built itself some impressive brands in the shape of MSN, Hotmail and Windows Live, but its search engine has so low a profile that it makes Yahoo, long short of being the market leader, look like a giant. It doesn't yet have a headlining online office suite, but rather than get its collective heads down to build one, it would rather

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belittle the very successful competition.

'If you'd seen what the Google tools that have tried to do productivity type things [do], they really don't have the richness, the responsiveness,' said Bill Gates, before sticking in the knife. 'For most of these Google products, to be frank, the day they announce them is their best day.'

Contrast this to Apple's approach. Its online presence falls short even of Microsoft's portfolio. It has .Mac and... well, that's all, really, and it's not exactly groundbreaking. The difference, though, is that Apple, famed for keeping quiet about lab-borne experiments until they blossom as commercial rollouts, isn't wasting its time by slagging off the competition. It doesn't care that it doesn't have a search engine (we assume), couldn't give two hoots that iWork isn't an online app (we think) and has never felt the need to criticise Flickr purely on the grounds that it lets us share photos easier than we can with iPhoto (or so we are led to believe).

If the future of software really is online then, looking at the current state of the market, Microsoft is in an infinitely stronger position. But it looks all the weaker for bleating about the state of its competitors' offerings in an attempt to divert attention from the sorry state of its own affairs.

Apple, it would seem, remembers the adage that if you don't have anything nice to say, you shouldn't say anything at all. Microsoft does not, and it's paying a heavy price for its forgetfulness.