Has the Empire struck back correctly, atlast?

Last month, i wanted to write a post with the Title,"Empire strikes back".
Never made it...but i did send a mail with the link to friends...

so, now comes a post with the same news but with additional info.

The latest news in search market ranking is,in June, Microsoft gains 0.7% of market share... which is around 9% rise in Microsoft's market share in a month.

I expected or lets say hoped that this will happen in June. All because of the innovative idea introduced by Microsoft.

http://search.live.com/cashback

Many might argue that this is not a real new innovative idea firstly deployed by MS. Agreed :)... but they have tried to do something different in the search space..

The point which i liked the most is, Microsoft might know very well that neither this will help in gaining tremendous market share nor this will impact its revenue bottomline...
But the act is in line with what Google does with its spreadsheets and docs...because even those are not helping Google boost its revenues...it's merely an exploring attempt...

so what's in store for me? :)
quite nothing! ...as i don't own any shares of these companies...
but i am sure this competition will lead to many more innovations which inturn will be beneficial to the end customers and will be interesting to bystanders like me ;)