The second biggest fear which made Sun sue Microsoft was that when MS licensed Java, their VM was faster than Sun's. Microsoft is (was?) the king of JIT. Technically biggest since if theirs was faster, they wouldn't have cared for Microsoft's anyway. Even now CLR is generally considered much faster than JRE.
I don't know how Chakra compares against v8 but then it also depends on what makes money for MS.
Just because you use Google's stuff all around doesn't mean Google were "one of the only players...."
Google was a distant third in IM behind MS and Yahoo.
I've never seen a Zebra doesn't mean the Zebra doesn't exist.