"The tech industry's giants - like Microsoft, Intel and Oracle - are famous for ruthlessly dealing with competitors. Not Yahoo."

This is not a universal rule. Google and Apple didn't deal ruthlessly with competitors.

i heard second-hand about a theory/hypothesis saying that companies who focus on countering their competition perform poorly compared to those who focus on their market/potential market. it's pretty obvious i think. focusing solely on the competition and the current market restricts the field of view to a tiny subset of possibilities

i imagine it's related to what leads companies into performing feature-by-feature comparisons of their products, as opposed to, say, creating an mp3 player whose design and construction completely ignores every other mp3 player on the market, yet still manages to saturate it

Google does give almost everything away for free. Apple's... users are pretty ruthless by proxy (alright, got me there).