Microsoft to launch last ditch search effort

By Stan Beer
Monday, 25 May 2009 19:32

Opinion and Analysis

Naturally Microsoft is a massively well resourced company - financially better resourced than Google. However, no amount of money can help it take down Google.

If you need an analogy, think about how the vastly better resourced IBM tried to take down the relative upstart Microsoft between the mid-1980s up until the launch of Windows 95 when the Big Blue finally realised it had lost the battle and gave up.

The fact was that Microsoft understood the desktop market much better than IBM and the big vertically integrated hardware and software company was powerless.

Now Microsoft is in a similar situation to the 1980s IBM. It understands how to make money from the desktop but it doesn't have a clue how to make money in the online space.

Google has all the best talent aroundr the world working on its search related products. Microsoft has a division in Redmond and some new recruits from Yahoo.

All that said, it will be interesting to see what Microsoft does come out with. Some reports say that it intends to spend as much as US$100 million on marketing its new search product.

That sounds a lot but in equivalent value to the sustained constant viral marketing that Google gets every minute of every day on the web for free, $100 million of air time is a mere drop in the ocean.

Microsoft can attempt to be a sumo with Kumo, have a fling with Bing, but in search Google will remain king. Ouch - sorry about that, it's late at night here.