Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft and Time Warner Team Up Against Google
PlayfullyClever wrote to mention a Reuters report on an online advertising deal between Microsoft and Time Warner. The two companies are teaming up to take on Google's advertising network. From the article: "The [WSJ] said the two companies were now focusing on a deal that would combine their advertising-related assets, with little or no money changing hands. It said they expected to reach an agreement before the end of the year, but that it was still possible that Time Warner's America Online unit could strike a deal with competitor Google instead."
TW/AOL:Losses in the billions.
Microsoft Entertainment/Internet Operations: Losses in the billions
Google have every right to be worried. With the losses these two titans amass, they could well suck up a lot of advertising revenue on the way to losing record billions.
hello, this is microsoft support, press 1 to refinance your mortgage, 2 for MSN help, 3 for pills that enhance your bedtime experience, 4 for office help, 5 to see if you are an instant winner of the tw/msn lottery, 6 for xbox help, 7 to register a microsoft product over the phone or stay on the line to hear nagamo mazoomba, former vice president of internal standards group, request your help in getting $43,675,00 out of a bank account in the caymans.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
So the deal is that AOL would drop Google as its main Internet search provider and switch to Microsoft's MSN service, because under their current agreement, Google derived about 11 percent of its first-half revenue from AOL.
But what happens if AOL users still go to Google despite the default search site is MSN?
MS still commands about 80% of the browser market, and its browser defaults searches to MSN, if this cannot help it, I doubt a deal with AOL could.
I believe a more substantial way is to be a good search provider, and users will be self-inviting.
I guess Time Warner stands to win whichever way the deal goes.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
Remember when AOL and Microsoft were mortal ememies? This only goes to show that just as in politics, there are no long term enemies, just long term interests
Their sites are WAY to cluttered!
Google is simple. There arent millions of distrations. You dont have to SEARCH for the search bar. you dont have to wait for the eyeblasters to load so that they can in turn obstruct your searching. GEEEZ people. it looks good the first time but after the 9999999th time you login just to do a simple search, and have to wait forever for the main page to connect to billions of addservers to serve you graphic adds, you end up back at google.
The thing is, I really hate being yet another "Slashdot is going downhill!" whiner, but they really seem to be. I've been around long enough to remember Slashdot before it was called Slashdot. Through Hellmouth and Jon Katz and when they started the interviews and started adding all these other subsections and colors and (OMFG - CSS compliance as of late!). And in all that time, Slashdot has fluctuated. The whole Andover thing. The whole OSDN thing. Michael getting married (WTF?) and Geeks in Space . . .
But in the last six months, it has gone from "sometimes lazy slashdot editor behavior" where they post a dupe or let a big typo slip by to the point where you can rarely go a day without multiples of the following happening - and I'm just talking about in the front-page section. I'm not talking about the GNAA type of stuff in the responses.
+ Duplicate from the same week, day or hours before.
+ Duplicate from the same or previous years.
+ Trip...er..licate . . .
+ Intentional slashvertisement.
+ Unwitting (or uncaring) slashvertisement ala **BeatlesBeatles, etc. Or worse - press relases.
+ Unwitting (or uncaring) contribution to trolls (ala CleverlyFunny and others)
+ Crap I've already seen on Drudgeerport. If Drudgereport is reporting it, it's sort of . . . done with.
+ Wierd slashvertisement sort of buddy system gratis thing where a particular site seems to get EVERY article they write featured on Slashdot. It's almost like one of the editors' girlfriends ran TheEscapist or PennyArcade or JoelonSoftware or something and they felt compelled to post a blurb on Slashdot about every single article out of support.
And sure, people could "just leave", but a lot of us have been here for seven or eight years and really don't want to have to do that. But man . . . it's almost like the Slashdot editors don't even care about Slashdot anymore. I find a lot of faults with Zonk, but at least he seems to TRY. It even seems as if the rest of the Slashdot elders just always decide to go fishing or take long naps for weeks at a time and stick Zonk and ScuttleMonkey with all the actual work and don't follow up to make sure their quality is up to par (or maybe even teach them what to do in the first place.... not that the old Slashdot editors seem to have a clue anymore what that should be either). . . .
If your numbers are from TFA, I can't see it because the link is giving me a Yahoo! error page, so I went to Google to find some info.
Are your numbers for unique visitors to any page owned by the companies in your list? Do those numbers even matter- aren't we talking about ads in search results?
Yahoo gets hits because they were giving away free email when AOL execs were still wondering why someone who has an ISP would need a free email account. Their search engine, while not as powerfull as Google's, does have its merits.... better geographical searches (nice for when i can't find any pizza menus to order from), and a higher likelyhood of search results I was looking for rather than 50,000 pages of exactly what i asked for.
MSN getting 110 (10 million less than AOL) is nothing short of abject failure. Its the default homepage on 90% of the computers IN THE WORLD.
In short, AOL's niche market (internet training wheels) is soon to be obsolete, and MSN.com can't get more hits than AOL.com even when its the default search page on most of the computers in the world.
My prediction-- Google will outlive the PC platform (im assuming that the world wide web will outlive the PC). MSN and AOL will not. Yahoo..... who knows.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016