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Financial Incentives for Live Search Data
InfoWorldMike writes "In an apparent attempt to boost its disappointing Web search market share, Microsoft will give 'service or training credits' to companies that will share employees' Live Search usage data. The program is being tested with 'a select number of enterprise customers based on the number of Web search queries conducted by their employees via Live Search,' Microsoft said in a statement late on Thursday. The move prompts InfoWord's ed-in-chief to ask: Is Office Live Microsoft's gateway drug?"
In an apparent attempt to boost its disappointing Web search market share, Microsoft will give 'service or training credits' to companies that will share employees' Live Search usage data.
Screw training credits. There was an email going around that said Bill Gates had some intertron email tracking system and he was giving out cash money, and all you had to do was forward the email to all of your friends. Seriously.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Information wants to be free.
or
Good information is worth paying for!
Ahhhh.....
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
how many people use msn? it cant be 10% usually when google doesnt find anything, I just rephrase the terms. dont ever remember thinking "i bet msn has it"
besides you really want msn tracking you?
and for what? credits? might as well be free skee ball coupons
and the government won't need to require it. Win-win...uh, for somebody...
What?
(With apologies to the late Bill Hicks) - Go on, suck Satan's cock. Drink that black worm jism. Drink it! Fill your little bellies. You'll get free service credits in exchange!
this is a joke right ? you would have to be a pretty desperate company to actually pay people to use your product
says everything you need to know about the quality of "Live Search"
also this little titbit was interesting
Microsoft said computer maker Lenovo Group will pre-load Windows Live services on its ThinkPad notebooks, ThinkCentre desktops and Lenovo-branded PCs.
remind me and your enterprise customers not to buy a Thinkpad until the budled crap is removed by Lenevo,
corporate customers dont want their PC's polluted with the kind of crap that the OEM home retailers get away with,even Microsoft call the bundling "craplets" with good reason, everytime i see any toolbar or "desktop search" application controlled by a company whos has income is derived by advertising or personal data it gets removed ASAP for the threat it is
i dont care if its Google, Yahoo, MS or 180solutions its all the same to me
perhaps there should be more awareness of the privacy and security implications of having such products on your PC (in any enviroment) then perhaps Linux will make more inroads
AJS
that is so cute!!!
Wow, talk about selling your soul to the devil.
Give more and more of your personal information, and get some worthless software or 'credits'.
Going away from paying for a halfway useful product, to selling your personal data.
...more monopolistic practices coming out of Redmond... when you can't beat 'em, leverage your monopoly in Operating Systems & business desktops by promising companies lower prices for products and training if they do what the masters demand.
Democrats have control again, lets see if they have the nuts to take a stand and stop this crap once and for all!
once i went to school with this big black guy he wore glasses and had a fro like all bluckguys had in the 80's he was very tall and big but not fat we called him cheesecakes brown and we assumed he had a phenomenal penis
kthxbye
Why compete when you can just buy your customers?
Google made it big by producing a new, clean, fast and thorough search engine.
Microsoft just wants to give people money to use theirs.
Do they even *remember* what competition is about?
This is a shrewd move by Microsoft to boost Live Search by tapping into its loyal and well established enterprise customers, but the strategy has its risks, said industry analyst Greg Sterling from Sterling Market Intelligence.
Doesn't this violate the Sherman Antitrust Act: where a monopoly cannot use their market power (IE: existing customer base) to extend into other fields / markets .
Is Microsoft trying to make good on all that SPAM that said if you sign your name on some forwarded email that Bill Gates will send you money in the (snail) mail - even though you never typed your address?
Maybe there is something to paying your userbase?!? I just haven't quite figured it all out yet. Maybe you can help me out...
1. Make Internet product
2. Give it free to users
3. Pay users to use it
4. ????
5. Profit !!!!!!!
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Judging by the enormous amount of R&D that Microsoft has been spending on data mining, I think they are just looking for more information to process.
Think about it. There are hundreds of thousands of businesses using Microsoft products to conduct their wares. Data mining techniques could be used to streamline the distribution of goods on an epic scale. Currently, there is no massive central agency handling the supplies and demands of an entire economy.
Information fueled mechanisms are what propel economic giants such as Walmart, although in an non-distributed manner. Similar ideologies are used by many other companies... Dell, Amazon, FedEx, MobilExxon.... What they really focus on is refinement of the supply chain in such a way that maximizes the business response to consumer activities. Any number of indicators can be used and all would point to a more fluid flow of capital, be it the immense reduction in stock inventory, or what have you.
The ability for a business to analyze a supply chain and a customer's need is at the root of our economic machine. The proper study and implementation of this sort of optimization can do wonders for a company's market operations. You can imagine how Microsoft views this sort of analysis over their entire customer base. I'm sure they dream of a day where scraping data off of the distributed structure of a significant proportion of Western culture can be used to refine a whole planet's allocations of goods.
Macroeconomic functions might not be very sexy, but they're the real driving force behind our civilization, for better or worse.
Don't think for a second that Microsoft is not aware of the cards they hold while seated at the all-star table of the capitalist game.
I've always prefered a command line interface. GUIs are such a cursory way to interact with a computer.
I'd wager it is just as much abut getting companies to have "Microsoft Trained" people in order to raise barriers to alternatives to MS. This isn't aimed at big corporations, people. This is aimed at small businesses. Gotta get those small businesses better indoctrinated, after all.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
My family's business uses MSN. It's either that or aol.com.
Me: "You can choose any website on the internet to be your homepage. You can use any search engine you want!"
Them: "Yeah, don't change anything."
Me: "The button is right here if you want to change it, though."
Them: "I'm busy right now." (proceeds to go shopping online, opens solitaire, etc)
Let's sit back & really think about the implications of this: 1) If you have to pay customers to use it, it's not a very good product 2) If you have to pay customers to use it, you're grasping at strings to hold on to the very little (I doubt msn has 10%) market share you do have 3) This is just another way that MS is trying to "bully" their way around (using cash, as always, instead of solid design fundamentals) 4) By offering "MS Training," MS is just trying to keep the corporate IT professionals who only know MS products in those organizations (if you're an IT professional & ALL YOU KNOW IS MS, don't you think when decision time comes on solutions, you'll suggest an MS product? it's called job security) When you look at the sum of the whole, all it points to is Microsoft being increasingly desperate to maintain their well-bought foothold in the corporate environment. Everything they've been doing lately points to this- suing the pants off of anyone who gets in their way, offering free domain names for beta testers of Office Live, etc. This being March Madness & all, it reminds me of a team who has had a large lead get whittled away by the feisty upstart (OSX, Linux, OpenOffice.org, Google, the open document format, etc.)...they don't know how to handle it & panic, until finally the upstart catches 'em & eventually passes 'em & wins the game partly because of their increased momentum & partly because the team in the lead got caught like a deer in headlights.
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. -Mahatma Ghandi
Okay Microsoft, we'll give you all our users' Live search data. *hands Microsoft a blank sheet of paper* That's all of it. Now where are these training credits?