Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Ballmer On Microsoft's Search Goofs

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the at-least-that's-honest dept.

An anonymous reader writes "AP reports on CEO Steve Ballmer's regret over Microsoft's failure to get into the search market early on. Best quote? 'I want to make sure (a user) can't get through ... an online experience without hitting a Microsoft ad.' Nice to see they're still user-oriented."

3 of 487 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Look at their history by Renegade+Lisp · · Score: 5, Informative
    Internet Explorer is the best and most compatible web browser.

    I don't want to be feeding the troll, but seriously, you don't believe this, do you? IE has a history of breaking every conceivable W3C standard as Microsoft sees fit, and it's only because of Microsoft's monopoly that they can get away with it.

    Have you ever tried to make any web page look the same in IE and any other browser? Surely, the very idea of being "the most compatible" is somewhat moot if there's no point of reference. Who (or what) do you think IE is compatible with?

    And concerning which browser is "the best", there's always the classic list of 101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot.

  2. Actual context of the quote by ethnocidal · · Score: 5, Informative
    'At the conference, Microsoft also unveiled a study on the effectiveness of online advertising. The company is using the study as the basis for an argument that companies spending about 1 percent of their advertising budget online should consider increasing that to 4 percent or 5 percent because people are spending more time online.

    Ballmer said Microsoft spends about 12 percent of its media budget on online advertising, and that he orders his staff to "saturate" that market first and foremost.

    "I want to make sure (a user) can't get through ... an online experience without hitting a Microsoft ad," he said.'

    Which is somewhat different from that implied by the submitter; rather than Microsoft wanting to dominate search space, and slapping their ads on everything, it's actually a suggestion that online advertising can be effective, and that companies should spend more of their marketing budget online.

    Given the dearth of funding models for many websites, I'm amazed that people are willing to twist an attempt to get more money into advertising online as something more evil.

  3. Re:World's most integrated by 33degrees · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, they just did release a toolbar and, unsurprisingly, it's an exact copy of google's, linked to MSN. I'm not going to bother installing to see if it uninstall's google's though...