Is Google a copy cat?

Over at O’Reilly, Mark Sigal makes a provocative argument about Google:

All of this is, of course, very funny because isn’t Google’s whole business model about imitating, co-opting and commoditizing?

I don’t agree with him that the kind of copying Bing is engaging in is fundamentally different than the kind of copying Google does. Google strikes me as a market follower — they bring the Google sensibility to paths that others have blazed. In this case, Microsoft is engaging in rank plagiarism.