Hm, a lot of opinions here, ranging in insight. This one was the most perceptive, in my opinion:
It’s not as if these companies are gearing up to produce automobiles. The engineering teams for any of these products are, at most, 20 to 30 people — immaterial for Microsoft, which has 90,000 or so employees, and Google, which has 20,000. Nor are all of Google’s products even guaranteed to ship, being as they are in that semi-solid technical state called beta test and subject to cancellation on a whim.
The problem with this statement is that Cringely has no way of knowing this and the facts publicly available contradict his account.
Just to give one example look at Steve Ballmer and Bing. Unless he's flat out lying he's going to spend 5% to 10% of Microsoft's operating income on Bing (http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/171648.asp). That's not exactly immaterial as Cringely claims.
All of that spending thus far has been on marketing / advertising bullshit.
They're probably blowing piles of money on datacenters too, but they'd be doing that anyway even if the Bing thing never happened. They see Google doing it and feel left out!
This comment is wrong bordering on the obscene. Does he think Bing, which competes with Google feature-for-feature, can be built by 30 people, while Google itself needs most of its 20,000 employees to build its search engine? The same goes for the ChromeOS vs. Windows case. It's as though he thinks both Bing and ChromeOS are just toy products, mere demos designed to poke the competitors or rile up the press. They're not.
It’s not as if these companies are gearing up to produce automobiles. The engineering teams for any of these products are, at most, 20 to 30 people — immaterial for Microsoft, which has 90,000 or so employees, and Google, which has 20,000. Nor are all of Google’s products even guaranteed to ship, being as they are in that semi-solid technical state called beta test and subject to cancellation on a whim.