Microsoft is beginning to look a bit desperate in its hunt for search
market share. Speaking at a dinner at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the company is willing to lose "5 to 10 percent of total operating income" for 5 years to win in online search, a market where Microsoft plays a distant third at best.
Right now, Google holds the lion's share of the search market, with the latest numbers from comScore actually showing Google grabbing market share from its rivals. In August, Google had 63% of the market (up from 61.9%), compared to Yahoo's 19.6% (down .9%) and Microsoft's paltry 8.3% (down .6%).
Doesn't conventional competitive wisdom say that if you can't be No. 1 or No. 2 in a market, perhaps it's not the place to invest? And if you are going to invest, you better have a good plan in place? But while Ballmer admitted Microsoft is obsessed with growing search market share, he was unable to articulate an actual strategy. The closest he came to that was this tidbit:
"We need to do some work to fundamentally reinvent the search business model. You don't brute-force your way into a market. You only make great strides when you redefine the category for the user."
Ballmer better come up with his redefinition fast. While Google's search success probably sticks in his craw, Google is no Netscape and won't be easy to topple. And spending that much time and resources in one losing area is risky. Microsoft is being attacked on all sides--VMware in virtualization, cloud computing, new browser wars, Apple vs. Vista's lack of success and so on. While the white whale of Google and its search juggernaut keep taunting the Ahab of Microsoft, Microsoft's overweening focus on beating Google in the search game could end up swamping its business.
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Why is this so complicated?
I guess the first principle I would apply here is: It's the Search, Stupid. I have tried Live Search and many other Google alternatives and they haven't yet met Google's bar.
I have no allegiance to Google and, in fact, wish it could give me more of "what I need" instead of too many results based on "what I typed." That said, it still yields better results than the others. If Microsoft even improved just the search results of its own web site that would be a huge improvement. How many times have we all tried to solve a Windows problem by searching in their knowledgebase only to drop back to Google and get a better result and faster resolution?
So, for what it is worth, my recommendations would be:
1. Get the "simple" stuff right first: accuracy, speed, cached results. I will switch immediately to anyone who does this better.
2. Figure out a way to index information that is stuffed in databases and not available to standard browsers. Others are doing this but you have to pay for it and we're all cheap.
3. Once you have done 1 & 2, only then start integrating the knowledge store with your applications. It would be very cool, for example, to be working on a report and have a search tool sidebar that, whenever you want, offers relevant topics. However, items 1 & 2 must work INCREDIBLY well. Otherwise, it will get in the way and be useless.
On the wacky idea side, an interesting place to gain a beach-head might be a super fast mobile browser search function/button (extended to non-Windows platforms like Blackberry, by the way). I constantly use Google on my mobile phone but find that it is still quite primitive.
got it backwards
Microsoft is the White Whale; google is capt. ahab.
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