What’s Microsoft Gotten into Now? Search Me!
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Yes, it’s a horrible pun. But it’s also irresistible -- and so’s the story. Moreover, it explains exactly why Microsoft and the European Union couldn’t come to any kind of negotiated settlement about Microsoft’s competition-squashing behavior. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
It seems that Microsoft opened its fifth annual MSN Strategic Account Summit recently. The shindig included tons of advertising brass and all sorts of important folks from the Internet end of things, like Terry Semel (chairman and CEO of Yahoo!), and Greg Stuart (president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau). Yours truly didn't receive an engraved invitation, alas; it would have been fun, because, to all accounts, it was a great chance to see Microsft's CEO Steve Ballmer actually admit that his company made a mistake.
Don't start cheering. The mistake was in outsourcing Web search technology rather than creating it in-house, and Ballmer intends to play catch-up with a vengeance. Within 12 months the company will unveil its own Internet search technology. Microsoft can do it, too; they've got billions of dollars invested in research and development.
So what is this new technology going to be like? Well, if it was just going to duplicate what's already out there, it'd be a waste of time for Microsoft to do it. Granted, MSN gets enough visitors on its own that maybe it only needs to be just as good, not better -- but let's face it, searching the Web really needs improvement. Even Google, the search engine that's tops in my book, can hardly index more than one percent of what's out there. It isn't just that there's so much out there; it's that a lot of what's out there is stored in databases that require users to register -- which can range anywhere in price from free to thousands of dollars -- and are not open to searching by the general public. So you may not even know that the information you need actually exists somewhere, but you just can't get to it. In cases where you do get lots of answers to your query, many of them are redundant. It's feast or famine, and sometimes both at once.
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