WebProNews

Google has been accused of stealing the thunder of others on numerous occasions. The most recent example cited in a post from the VP of Marketing for Blekko is Google's structured data product, which WebProNews covered here.

Google's Matt Cutts has posted a response/defense to the notion that Google is out to steal any thunder. He takes each point made by Mike Markson, the Blekko guy, and counters it with why Google was not "stealing any thunder." His response to that initial point is this:

"I wasn't familiar with this one, so I dropped an email to Ola Rosling, the Googler employee who wrote the blog post announcement," says Cutts. "It turns out that there’s a straightforward reason for the timing: the blog post was planned for a different day, but an early/unexpected baby arrival resulted in this blog post being rescheduled."

Another instance mentioned by Markson was when Cuil announced that it indexed 120 billion documents, and 3 days before it Google announced it had a trillion. Cutts says Google passed a trillion a month before.

There are several other items mentioned, but Cutts counters each one, though Markson is not entirely convinced by all of them as an update to his original post indicates.

Is Google out to steal the thunder of others? Maybe, maybe not. Does Google have the right to do so? I don't see why not. If potential competitors are announcing things that can persuade people that they are better than Google in some way, why would Google not want people to know that they are as good/better in that particular area when applicable? Wouldn't you do the same for your business? Yes, Google is a very dominant force, but while they generally don’t turn out to be, how many of these things have been labeled "Google-killers?" Is Google supposed to roll over to the competition?  What do you think?