With Checkout, Google is ready to take your order | CNET News.com: "Last week, Google introduced Google Checkout, an online checkout system that lets people make purchases from participating merchants using a single sign-in system. Google gives its AdWords paid search customers a discount to use the service. An icon on their ads tells shoppers they can make a fast purchase from that store.

It's a similar idea, but a different company, different time and no privacy hubbub--at least not yet. It begs the obvious question: Does the world really trust Google--the company with the 'Do no evil' motto--that much more than Microsoft, the company sued by the Justice Department on antitrust grounds?"

Microsoft was creating a payment/identity system from scratch, while Google just adds a yet another service to its package. To majority of customers Checkout looks like an incremental step, it doesn't exceed sensitivity threshold ( cf frog that gets boiled incrementally).
In reality this is a much stronger play than Microsoft ever envisioned. It closes search-advertisement-sale loop, which enables Google to fine tune its "lead generation" engine and lock its customers within a walled garden.
Another product that is targets customers' control sub-system, thus creating a strong control point within internet-based marketplace.

tags: control point google microsoft multi