Microsoft`s Search Bribery: a Brief Overview - Other Purchasing Ploys
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As I mentioned earlier, Microsoft made other bribes to get web surfers to use its search engine. The earliest that I can recall dates to March 2007. In that case, as John Battelle reported, Microsoft began offering its large enterprise customers free service and product credits if they would convince their employees to use Live Search while on the job. Battelle described a PowerPoint presentation which estimated that companies could earn from $2 to $10 per computer per year, plus a $25,000 "enrollment credit." That's not chicken feed when you're talking about the hundreds or thousands of employees that work at a single large company.
Speaking of large companies, one recent attempt to gain further market share in the search area involved Microsoft using its money far more directly, to purchase Yahoo. Indeed, at one point this year, Microsoft put up $44 billion in a combined cash-and-stock deal that would have valued Yahoo at more than $30 per share. That deal fell through, though at the time of this writing there is still some serious speculation that Microsoft will buy at least the search portion of Yahoo's business. There are also reports that an ex-AOL CEO is trying to raise money to purchase the venerable search engine, so at this point it's hard to know what to believe.
While the attempt to purchase Yahoo, in part or entirely, seems to have fallen through, Microsoft is still trying to promote the programs it thinks actually ARE working, namely Cashback. Normally there is a waiting period before users get their refunds, in part to make sure that they're not going to return the item. But in the face of the Black Friday disaster, Microsoft began offering instant cashback on some eBay purchases. It required the user to pay for the item through PayPal, and deposited the refund automatically into the user's PayPal account for qualifying purchases. The software giant claimed that the new program was in no way connected to, or an apology for, the Black Friday outage, but some bloggers made the connection anyway.
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