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How Microsoft Failed At Search

  • PC World, Tuesday, November 10, 2009 12:24 PM
Juan Carols Perez believes Microsoft has, for the most part, been able to earn a prominent spot at the top of the technology chain -- well, in all areas but one. Perez point to search as the one market where the company's "doggedness" has failed to pay off.

Armed with years of statistics and references (plus a timeline), Perez marches through Microsoft's failings in search one by one. He also provides insight on how Google changed the search landscape.

Read the whole story at PC World »

1 comment about "How Microsoft Failed At Search".
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  1. Bruce McDermott from Atom Valley, November 12, 2009 at 3:42 p.m.

    Microsoft taught us that you could create buggy software but as long as you made it user-friendly it would always beat out the competition. I don't think anyone but geeks have ever read a manual on how to operate a piece of MS software. It's all intuitive unlike open source. So MS correctly believed, that with software, "quality" isn't always the deciding factor.

    Google taught us that if you pair good search with the ability for users to make money its "game over" for the other guys.

    Google's power comes from its advertising/network of paid publishers that generate the 5 billion it makes every 3 months on primarily PPC advertising.

    If Microsoft goes after an alternative online advertising process that allows the net to shift from low-performing low-paying Adwords/Adsense, then Microsoft will own Google's revenue engine...the publishers. This isn't that hard to do. Simply look to SEO for the alternative and once again software quality will have nothing to do with the ultimate winner.

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