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?"

Comments

yeah

[User 956]

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.

Re:yeah

[hedwards]

This is completely different, this time he doesn't care if the data is real.

OMG - head explodes...

[NotQuiteReal]

Which is it?

Information wants to be free.

or

Good information is worth paying for!

Ahhhh.....

Re:OMG - head explodes...

[Timesprout]

Open Source like to bang the 'information wants to be free' drum when it suits them but the simple fact is that information has always been, and will always be valuable. With current search technology companies are building up vast data stores and anything that extracts meaningful data is therefore valuable.

not gonna happen

[Mean Ass Troll]

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

Re:not gonna happen

[tomhudson]

I think it might - all those sysadmins with linux and bsd boxes squirreled away now have an excuse to create scripts to hammer microsoft's search engine - "Hey boss, linux is good - we're using it to earn the company credits."

If they REALLY want to capitalize on it, they can hire a spyware programmer to help turn their desktops into a botnet cluster when the employees aren't using them.

Re:not gonna happen

[JackieBrown]

I have seen several people search the the live search. Those are the same people who just got a 2 year tech degree in everything microsoft and are then shocked when the job offers don't start rolling in.

Re:not gonna happen

[Jedi Alec]

Yeah, sorry Bill, but it seems 90% of the searches conducted from within our company relate to sorting out Windows problems. A very common one seems to be "how do i get rid of this msn crap?". "internet explorer crash" seems to be quite popular as well.

Make data collection and warehousing profitable

[iminplaya]

and the government won't need to require it. Win-win...uh, for somebody...

Smells like

[Alascom]

...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!

Why Compete On Merit?

[GaryPatterson]

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?

Re:Why Compete On Merit?

[FutureDomain]

"If you can't beat them, bribe them."

If it works for politicians, then it should work for users. Right?

Re:Why Compete On Merit?

[mgblst]

Don't forget that google pays Dell to install its applications on all the machines they sell, so that Google search is set as default. Google is not above paying for customers too, this has what it has come down to.

Sherman Antitrust Act

[Anonymous Coward]

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 .

Re:Sherman Antitrust Act

[cheater512]

Yeah but Microsoft has all the best anti-trust lawyers. They've been getting lots of practice.

Re:Sherman Antitrust Act

[h2_plus_O]

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.

Doubtful. IANAL, but first of all, Microsoft has been found to hold a monopoly in a narrowly-defined market only: Intel-compatible PC Operating Systems. They certainly don't have monopolies in anything relevant here (search? productivity apps? online gadgets? not even.) so there's not much they can leverage that would be unfair to the competition. They're giving their customers a discount on a product very few people use (Office Live) in exchange for their using another product very few people use, live search.
In other words, it doesn't look like they're leveraging a monopoly, so much as they're courting customers by giving them price incentives to try out the new gizmos.

TFA doesn't specify whether any violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act are happening, but this blog provides a bit more in the way of detail: customers who enroll:
1) choose how many computers they want to enroll,
2) these boxes get a 'bho' installed on them to measure search usage and presumably phone home about it,
3) they get credits based on the measurements.

This looks like a product-bundling incentive program. While searching for information on the legality of bundling, I ran across this discussion, which draws a distinction between what it calls 'mixed bundling' and 'predation'. He concludes thus:

If cross-subsidies from monopoly to competitive markets are considered potentially anticompetitive, a rule against mixed bundling should be based not on a comparison of price and cost, but on the market power in the bundled-product markets. The less likely it is that A is earning monopoly profits in the market for one bundled product, the less concern there is that a mixed bundle could have anticompetitive effects.

Microsoft copying SPAM inovation?

[Adeptus_Luminati]

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 !!!!!!!

Re:you have to laugh

[JoeCommodore]

...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...

Here is your reminder: it's a company that thought that limiting the users options to a proprietary OS is a "good thing" and would increase thier sales. I guess they forgot to fire that marketing guy who game up with such great ideas.

Infoconomy

[WilliamCotton]

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.

Re:Infoconomy

[jackv]

That's a fascinating point. The key is the responsiveness according to the current whimsy of the consumer . How quickly can an organisation react to a percieved change in demand.Are the current data warehousing techniques sufficient ?

Re:Infoconomy

[WilliamCotton]

Dell does an amazing job. They basically have no inventory. They can pretty much wait until someone purchases a computer from them and then have it custom built. Their secret is their IT, of course. With the redundant network of component distributors that they have, there's not much of a worry of some link in the chain failing either.

Walmart just trucks things in and loads everything on to the shelves at it's stores. You are basically shopping at a warehouse, that if you've ever noticed, is kind of sparse. They run out of things all the time there. They can get a way with that because there's 200,000 other things to buy, so you'll probably end up getting a new garden hose, even if you came in to buy a certain gas grill.

Both companies monitor trends and use methods of unsupervised learning to better understand their markets and anticipate demand on incredibly thin margins.

Again, these are all intra-company IT refinements. We of course have refinements to our economy in general. The whole system of securities and commodities trade is one such mechanism, but it doesn't really deal with the fine grained behavior. It's for the big boys and has more of a trickle-down effect on the small business.

There is plenty of room for advancement in the world of statistical computing and applied mathematics. I am very interested in data mining techniques and read a lot of papers. I was surprised to find how many were coming from people either at or now working for Microsoft. I'm sure that Google is hiring plenty of like-minded people, being that PageRank is based on a similar principle, but I never find many published papers from their employees.

Again, Microsoft finds itself in a very important situation by having so many customers, especially the number of small businesses that use their products.

The ability to react to the whims of the consumer depends on how much information you have on those consumers and what you do with that information. Good methods have been found and shown to work well intra-company. Perhaps Microsoft or Google could utilize such methods on an inter-company scale.

Re:Infoconomy

[jackv]

We could take this idea one step further and look at customisation on the fly. This , to some extent is possible with information based products. i.e software that can reconfigure information according to the requirements of the user. This is slightly more difficult with hardware. Although , you've outlined a good example ,Dell, who have componentized the supply chain process - to the extent where they have little , if any inventory.

Two pronged approach

[Shadowlore]

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.

is MS this desperate?!!!

[DJ_Maiko]

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.

Okay, will do

[Hotawa Hawk-eye]

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?