Surely I didn't read that right, MS have a $50 million budget just for Google smear campaigns!?

One of the biggest things that makes my blood boil is when corporations invest large sums of money to force consumers to use their crappy products instead of spending that money on making less crappy products that consumers choose to buy.

It should make your blood boil that our government operates in such a way that companies see this as just another vector for competing against each other.

Dan Lyon's piece is pure sensationalism. Reality is likely more like: 1) there is a government affairs group inside MSFT with a $50m+ annual budget (not crazy given the DOJ impact on the company) 2) they hire a connected political machinists and give him marching orders to drum up concern over Google in DC (the same way Oracle, Novell, Netscape did against MSFT--http://www.stern.nyu.edu/networks/homeworks/Microsoft_Case.p...). 3) Guy needs a network of folks to do his deeds—he runs around DC recruiting people telling him he has a massive budget because money seems to be the most effective way to persuade people in Washington (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/461/t...).

Meanwhile, there's a guy with a Google laptop bag doing the same thing.

Microsoft's huge smear budget is harmful to taxpayers too, because they actively have tricked large segments of the U.S. Federal Government (for example, the Dept. of Defense) into only using Microsoft software due to "the inherently insecure nature of open source." Even worse, they smear any browser that isn't IE. That holds back software adoption big time.