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Battle of the Tech Titans
garzpacho writes "BusinessWeek has a look at the big tech alliances that have been announced recently. From the article: 'In the war for dominance of the Net, May 25 turned out to be a big day for alliance making... The pairings highlight the importance the fast-growing, $12.5 billion Internet ad market and the race to get in front of as many Web surfers as possible. The alliance with eBay gives Yahoo a way to narrow a lead by Google in generating advertising sales. Paring with Dell, meantime, helps Google muscle in on Microsoft's dominance of the desktop. These alliances are predicated as a response to a looming threat...'"
How will these alliances really effect my browsing experience? Seems like these efforts will just be met with more efforts to block their ads.
Except for the simple microAds from Google, and which now appear all over the place, everything else I, or my company, block. Popups are blocked, ad sites are blocked. Sites that get too annoying with javascript ads, or use annoying pass-through ad pages too often, I stop visiting.
How much more $$$ can there actually be for advertisers on the web? Isn't everyone doing all they can to block these annoyances? Seems like the alliances will be irrelevant.
The larger issue in this case is the 12.5 billion dollar online advertising market. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are trying to generate revenue by serving up advertising. Because Google is integrating their toolbar and desktop search on Dell PCs, Microsoft is losing potential revenue that would have been generated by Dell shipping PCs with their browsers automatically feeding people into MSN.
On the subject of advertising, Microsoft is obviously flailing. They are trying to do too many things at once. That is good news for people who are taking aim at their core OS / application business, but bad news for people using Microsoft software.