Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Wants to Take on Google
blenderking writes "We do view Google more and more as a competitor. We believe that we can provide consumers with a better product and a better user experience. That's something that we're actively looking at doing,", says Bob Visse, director of marketing for Microsoft's MSN Internet services division, said. Full article at: Yahoo. This could have fit in with yesterday's April Fool's stories..."
An article month's PC Magazine mentioned this. The author shuddered at what a Microsoft Google would look like, perhaps something similar to the "teenage clutter" of MSN.
-- Who am I? How did I get here? My God, what have I done?!
Google also is successful because it doesn't have pay-for-placement results.
Um, actually we spend thousands per month with Google's pay per click sponsored placement. Not as much as we spend on Overture's, but still a lot. They have had this program for about 6 months now. It is different than Overture's in that it combines your 'top bid' along with what it says is relevence, but believe me, its all in what you pay.
That said, it is a great system, cost effective, and generates high quality leads that 3 times more likely to covert than AOL or Lycos. MSN comes second, then Yahoo. Aol has always sucked for conversion (buys during the same browsing session that they clicked on the ad) in the 3 years that I have tracked it. They do generate a lot of traffic, its just traffic that doesn't buy anything.
So yea, Google wants to make money, too. Good for them.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Viewing Google as a competitor from the consumer viewpoint is a mistake.
Except M$ got where it is by not caring about security, ripping off others' innovations then killing their company, dabbling in all markets, and only viewing competitors from the consumer viewpoint.
Seriously, when has quality even been part of M$'s strategy (and strange as this may sound, I don't mean that as a flame). If you have an ineffective DOJ, why not just keep utilizing your marketing and monopolistic strength to kill off competitors? Why is there any need to improve?
And sadly, this extends to a large degree to enterprise software as well. How smart is the typical CIO? Even more important, how much does the CEO know about software? Not much, which is why MS software is the safe choice for CIO's. Like the saying goes, buying MS doesn't get people fired (not *quite* true, but you get the idea).
A combination of FUD, astroturfing, buying shill journalists, buying out companies, market-killing monopoly extending has always been a good way for MS to win. Why would they stop now?
Quite frankly, I wouldn't do anything different from how they're doing it, except for their deranged obsession with piracy. If they ever figure out that widespread piracy does for them what they couldn't even LEGALLY DO (ie, dumping and undercutting to achieve market saturation), most of their OSS problems would disappear. Their arrogance in this area is one of the few things that could ever bring them down.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Are you talking about the paid links that appear to the side of the main results???
I was referring to pay-for-placement being not obvious from algorythmic results.
They have placement ads on the right and at the top. The ones at the top are barely differentiated from the search results, on purpose(The sponsored links). Believe me, this is part of why I use it.
Quoting Google: With Google AdWords you create your own ads, choose keywords to tell us where to show your ads and pay only when someone clicks on them.
Like I said, we spend thousand a month with just Google. I like google too, but they are just as "for sale" as the rest. Great. Im glad, because I am buying and I like what they are selling.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
That's why they phased it out!
Fortunately it's still available in 2k and XP as "mplayer2." Far superior to the uber-bloated WMP of today.
"[A] high IQ is like a Jeep; you will still get stuck, just farther from help!" --Just d' FAQs, c.g.a
They're not clearly marked as sponsor links? Gee, let's take a look. The first three are marked as "featured sites" by the text, "FEATURED SITES - ABOUT". The next 3 hits are labeled, "SPONSORED SITES - ABOUT" in exactly the same font. Furthermore, the "sponsored sites" which you are complaining about are not numbered and instead marked by a bullet, further setting them apart.
google ads are NOT called 'placement'. The terms 'pay for placement' or 'paid placement' have very specific meanings in the search engine industry, and google does not use them.
You might want to check out Media Player Classic (click on the MPC link) -- it's ol' Media Player, but with a whole whack of features such as DVD playback and a bunch of new supported file formats, including Ogg (audio/video), RealMedia & QuickTime.
Highly recommended. And no, I don't work them. I'm just a satisifed user! ;)
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
Interestingly enough, as bloated as WMP is supposed to be, it still takes up far less memory than mplayer2. I've just tested this out, and WMP took up only 8,800 K of memory as compared to mplayer2 which took 35,500 when playing a 700mb divx movie. This is physical memory usage - the CPU and VM usage is roughly the same for both.
Everybody I know at Microsoft, where I work as a contractor, uses Google as their primary search engine. Here's an example of why: recently at work I wanted the syntax for the VBScript SELECT CASE statement. I already had an MSDN window open for something else, so I typed in "vbscript select case" and here's what it found. Not wanting to wade through this mass of irrelevance I typed the exact same thing into Google and got this, a whole page of exactly what I was looking for.
Rock on.