Google Strives for a Comeback in D.C.’s High-Stakes Popularity Contest

In recent months members of Google’s Washington policy group received a new assignment: study the opposing team at Microsoft Corp. and figure out what it does that works so well. On paper it was a strange mandate. Microsoft was famously targeted by a government antimonopoly lawsuit in the 1990s, and Google spent its first decades trying desperately not to be the Redmond, Wash., company.

Today, though, there’s a serious case of Microsoft envy going around Silicon Valley. While Google parent Alphabet Inc. and its peers—Apple, Amazon, and Facebook—have been dragged through the political mud during the “techlash,” Microsoft has stayed clean. It sat out the marathon congressional hearings on the industry’s ills. New bills designed to curb tech’s market power don’t touch much of Microsoft’s business, even though it’s the U.S.’s second most valuable company. Microsoft still operates in China and makes mega-acquisitions (two deals since last year worth a combined $88 billion, pending approvals)—things that Google, for political reasons, simply can’t do.