My impression is there's often a lot of mis-communication. It could easily be that Google was 100% sincere. When they said they wouldn't give preferential treatment to Blogger they might have only been thinking about search results and nothing else. So in their mind they didn't break any agreement.
Conversely the other side might have thought "If Google runs a TV ad for Blogger they have to run TV ads for all other competing blogging systems and give them equal time."
Neither side is wrong, they just failed to convey what they were actually thinking when saying "no preferential treatment".
I've been in a similar situation where I has a partner in a small game dev company. We got a contract from a publisher to implement a game they had mostly designed already. When signing the deal we were told we could have input into the design. What the publisher meant was "We'll consider your comments and tweak a few things if we agree with them." What some of my partners heard was "The design can be 100% thrown away and re-created from scratch by us".
Needless to say there was lots of frustration on both sides.
Conversely the other side might have thought "If Google runs a TV ad for Blogger they have to run TV ads for all other competing blogging systems and give them equal time."
Neither side is wrong, they just failed to convey what they were actually thinking when saying "no preferential treatment".
I've been in a similar situation where I has a partner in a small game dev company. We got a contract from a publisher to implement a game they had mostly designed already. When signing the deal we were told we could have input into the design. What the publisher meant was "We'll consider your comments and tweak a few things if we agree with them." What some of my partners heard was "The design can be 100% thrown away and re-created from scratch by us".
Needless to say there was lots of frustration on both sides.