Microsoft makes the Enterprise its last stand in search

Stan Beer
Thursday, 18 May 2006 17:43

IT Industry - Market

Having been beaten black and blue by Google for the past five years in the search engine business, Microsoft seems to be setting itself to make the enterprise market its last bastion of resistance. The battle for the consumer market has been well and truly lost, where Microsoft now seems destined to be a bit player. However, the enterprise is a place where the game is somewhat different.

The enterprise is an environment where users don't get a choice - they have to use the systems handed to them by their employers. It is also a place where things move more slowly than the consumer space. While most enterprises will have Windows on their desktops, many of them date back to versions that some of us only vaguely remember such as Windows 2000. In many cases an enterprise with 50,000 desktops will only
refresh about 20% of them in a year. And that will not necessarily mean an upgrade of Microsoft Office.

Thus, we see Microsoft wooing corporate bosses with promises of increased productivity through an increasingly nebulous product called Windows Live Search, which seems to be taking on more promised capabilities by the day. No longer will Live Search be a mere internet search engine. It will also incorporate desktop search, corporate intranet search and even searching for human expertise within an organisation. The vision is indeed grand and Google is also pursuing it.

The big advantage that Microsoft has over Google in the corporate world is that it has already acquired hundreds of millions of users and has existing commercial relationships with a vast range of enterprises from small to the very large. Google, on the other hand, has far better search technology and already has a very good desktop search product that far exceeds anything available from Microsoft. Without a doubt, Google is already working on similar (and probably superior) offerings for the enterprise market.

In essence, it boils down to whether Microsoft can convince its corporate desktop customers that it can more tightly integrate its new corporate Windows Live Search offering with the enterprise desktop than Google can. However, Google has already proven that anything that Microsoft can develop in the search space for its own Windows platform, Google can do better. There is no magic behind the reason.

Microsoft occasionally sends its search engine experts on missions around the US and to foreign countries to find good people to join the relatively small search engine development team in Redmond. Meanwhile, Google builds its "Googleplexes" in foreign countries and finds the best local talent to staff them. It has thousands of people all over the world devoted purely to innovating new search products.

Bill Gates and company are making a last ditch effort to appeal to the corporate market with a new search platform offering, using folksy feel good business language like increased productivity and competitive advantage. However, at best it would appear to be a defensive attempt to stave off the Google drive onto the enterprise desktop. It may delay Google's entry into the corporate world but it won't stop it.