Microsoft has one advantage over Google in the search market, according to CEO Steve Ballmer. He says his company can experiment, while Google, the market leader, is forced to play it safe. "Google does have to be all things to all people," Ballmer told Bloomberg. "Our search does not need to be all things to all people." Ballmer noted that the challenge facing the search giant is similar to the challenge Microsoft faces with its Windows operating system, which needs to appeal to many different types of customers. As such, Ballmer says Google would be tentative about changing a formula …

Former MTV and AOL Networks CEO Bob Pittman thinks there's one glaring omission from the nearly $800 billion stimulus package: ad incentives for corporations that have slashed their marketing budgets. "To get people spending again, and the economy moving, the government needs to provide help for businesses in America to advertise their products and services," Pittman writes in an opinion piece for Fortune Magazine. He adds: "There's a reason that America is the largest consumer market in the world: It also happens to be the largest advertising market in the world." Is consumer spending directly related to how much corporations …

Apple on Thursday announced that it would start selling HD quality movies through its iTunes media store, but Dan Rayburn of The Business of Online Video says the business model is fundamentally flawed, as the HD downloads will cost $20-$3 more than the average DVD on Amazon. "This is just stupid," Rayburn argues, "how on earth can the studios continue to charge more for a digital download than a physical DVD?" Digital downloads cost far less to produce and distribute than DVDs, which have manufacturing and packaging costs. Meanwhile, the bandwidth cost to download a two-hour movie is mere pennies, …

In a blog post, Mahalo founder and CEO Jason Calacanis, who will be speaking at MediaPost's OMMA Global Hollywood event in Los Angeles next week, explains the reasoning behind his offer to pay Twitter $250,000 to make him one of the service's "suggested" users. For starters, he says, the offer was for Mahalo's Answers product, not for Calacanis' personal account, which he says is "probably bigger than it should be" at 60,000-plus followers. For a growing company like Mahalo, having its Answers product on the suggested users page represents a massive opportunity, resulting in as many as 10,000 new users …

Dotcoms are no longer making news with free new offerings. Instead, headlines these days are all about lay-offs and new pay-for services. Does this mean that the free online lunch is over -- again? Indeed, says The Economist, eight years after the dotcom crash, Web firms hoping to sell advertising against free content and services, find themselves in a familiar situation. It all started when Google went public in 2004, inflating a new "Web 2.0" bubble. Google's ability to place small, targeted text ads next to search results made it an Internet juggernaut, and sparked new hope that there was …

Speaking at a media conference in New York, NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker spoke about the future of Hulu, the joint online video venture between NBC and News Corporation. Zucker admitted that the transition from traditional to digital media is still a challenging one for big media firms. "We're at digital dimes now," he said. "There's a lot more to go before we get to dollars." Even so, Zucker claimed that Hulu is progressing ahead of schedule and would eventually make money, although he admitted that such services would probably not completely replace lost advertising revenue from TV, print, and …

Search and social media guru John Battelle lashes out at analysts from Sanford Bernstein who claim in a New York Timesarticle that monetizing Twitter "would be difficult at best and likely unsuccessful." Their claim is that subscription fees are out of the question, ad revenues would likely be minimal, and that people who sign up for free services tend to resent companies trying to make money from the business later. Well, "If it was easy, everyone would do it," Battelle replies, adding that he can pinpoint at least three "major potential revenue streams" for Twitter. They are: …