MSN: Still Too Much Junk in the Trunk - Where Do We Go From Here?
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So where does MSN go from here? Well for starters, it was recently announced that Yahoo and eBay have formed a pretty major partnership revolving around advertising and e-commerce with an eye to competing against Google. There is strength in numbers, so they say. But Microsoft, for the most part is still on an island by itself when it comes to search.
An obvious solution which Microsoft could certainly afford is an acquisition on a grand scale with either Yahoo or eBay, or a roll up of both. That buys market share, but in order to maintain it MSN will still require some major modifications to its search engine. My opinion is that at this stage of the game MSN will not be able to compete against Google in the search game without a major acquisition or two, and even then a very effective game plan would be needed to ensure another AOL/Netscape merger doesn’t take place. For those of you who don't remember, AOL paid crazy dollars to purchase Netscape and then promptly got thrashed by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. It was pretty much a wasted purchase.
Money muscle alone used to be enough back in the old days. Today, even an acquisition on a gargantuan scale can and will be wasted if there isn’t a solid game plan in place for not only the acquisition but the short term future of both companies. In this instance, that means opening up to the search engine optimization community and really becoming involved with the opinions of the average Joe who might consider using their search engine. This really should be approached much like a campaign to win the hearts and minds of the Internet community – a constant struggle that Microsoft has had to endure for quite some time now.
A similar battle rages on with Microsoft vs. the open source community, and until recently Microsoft didn’t get it. It was and is very hip to bash Microsoft. Why is that? Even if Microsoft had the most perfect server OS in the history of mankind there would still be network administrators who would NEVER run a Microsoft OS. You know the kind of anti-Microsoft person I am talking about. They live to bash Microsoft. The first step to solving any problem is recognizing it exists, and that's not a bad place to start for MSN.
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