Dear Mr. Diller:
You gave up too
easily by throwing your hands in the air and surrendering the $1.85 billion acquisition investment in Ask.com after concluding Google just can't be beat. Thank goodness we don't have more media moguls
like you running companies and laying off 130 respected engineers. If we did there would be no SAP, because they would have conceded to Oracle or Microsoft. There would be no Research In Motion,
because they would have conceded to Apple or Google. And, there would be no AOL, because the portal would have conceded to Yahoo.
That kind of thinking limits choices for consumers,
advertisers and marketers. By the way, I'm not too fond of Yahoo's decision to throw in the towel either, but at least they partnered with Microsoft. The two, believe it or not, have a fighting chance
of keeping competition alive.
Remember when we learned Google had turned from an adjective to a verb? Well, evidently the same has begun to happen with Bing -- at least in one Huntington
Beach, Calif., high school. Yes, it took time, work and millions of dollars in advertising, but Microsoft might have begun to slowly change the habit of some consumers.
Just the
other day, in a conversation with a local high school student, I learned of a Spanish teacher and class referring to "Binging" search results. They don't "Google" search results on a specific topic in
class. They prefer to "Bing" it because of the educational information provided on Bing's home page in the hot spots hidden in the picture.
Google captured about 10.6 billion searches, or
66.1%, of U.S. market share in September, up 3% sequentially, according to comScore's latest numbers. Yahoo accounted for 16.7% billion, down
0.7%; while Microsoft took 11.2%, up 0.1%. Ask Network captured 3.7% of explicit core searches, followed by AOL's network with 2.3%.
In July, Ask launched a social network allowing people to poll the community for the best possible answer. The
engine hopes to tap into the approximate 87 million people visiting the search engine monthly. The project had been in the works for seven months.
Believe me, you're not the only business
person who refuses to compete with Google-like service. Referring to Google, I've heard statements like "it's hard to compete with that war chest."
In a blog post, Ask.com President Doug Leeds wrote "This decision was made for a number of reasons we believe will ultimately benefit our company and our products, including
cost, office location, and -- most importantly -- focus." Oh, please. It takes talent to build a competitive and entrepreneurial landscape. You had the search engine dead and buried long ago.
In fact, Mr. Diller, you gave up long before
shuttering the service by psyching out advertisers, convincing them to take their campaign budgets somewhere else. In July, a flood of excuses escaped your lips. The DailyFinance cited you as admitting "I was wrong about the competitive landscape with Google."