Microsoft already has the presence via MSN.. Second most visited website in the world, over 10 million customers. Plus they have a strategic alliance with the second largest Telecom company in the US, Verizon. This gives them access to millions of new users. MSN is the brand. It has been developed over 4 years. It already gets more traffic than Google every month and it has a search box on each of its million plus pages.

How big of a brand do you really think Google is? The majority of their money comes from selling search results to other companies like AOL/Netscape. It doesn't come from their own website and services. Sure they are big but not as big as you would seem to think. Google is currently positioning itself as an Advertising firm. Everything they do is geared to serving advertising whether it is search, free email, or anything else. Microsoft, as I already said, provides solutions. Very different takes on things.

In the end, there will be three primary search engine companies - Yahoo, Microsoft and Google. Google actuallly has the most to lose because they have nothing else. The others are diversified companies with multiple revenue streams.