Jeff

lol
well
I use one "undead" service,
messenger- and that's it-no "Undead" search for me.
It's not "LIVE'; so it's gotta be UNDEAD
Windows "Undead" Messenger
ROFLMAO

Jeff

"Chad Harris" <msftneedstogetoutvistainfo.net> wrote in message
news:uXmFFJJHHHA.1816@TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl...
> December 9, 2006
> New York Times
> Biz Section Above Da Fold
>
> Looking for a Gambit to Win at Google's Game
> By SAUL HANSELL
>
> There is a lot about the way Microsoft has run its Internet business that
> Steve Berkowitz wants to change. But he is finding that redirecting such a
> behemoth is slow going.
>
> "I'm used to being in companies where I am in a rowboat and I stick an oar
> in the water to change direction," said Mr. Berkowitz, who ran the Ask
> Jeeves search engine until Microsoft hired him away in April to run its
> online services unit. "Now I'm in a cruise ship and I have to call down,
> 'Hello, engine room!' " he adds with an echo in his voice. "Sometimes the
> connections to the engine room aren't there."
>
> The pressure is on for Mr. Berkowitz to gain control of Microsoft's online
> unit, which by most measures has drifted dangerously off course. Over the
> last year, its online properties have lost users in the United States. The
> billions of dollars the company has spent building its own search engine
> have yet to pay off. And amid a booming Internet market, Microsoft's
> online unit is losing money.
>
> Google, meanwhile, is growing, prospering, and moving increasingly onto
> Microsoft's turf.
>
> Microsoft lost its way, Mr. Berkowitz says, because it became too enamored
> with software wizardry, like its new three-dimensional map service, and
> failed to make a search engine people liked to use.
>
> "A lot of decisions were driven by technology; they were not driven by the
> consumer," he said. "It isn't always the best technology that wins. It is
> the best experience."
>
> It is no small task to run an Internet operation that can move as fast, be
> as popular and make as much money as Google. (That explains why Yahoo
> announced this week that its chief operating officer was leaving, and why
> the chief executive of AOL was fired last month.)
>
> But Mr. Berkowitz's job is made far more complicated because Microsoft is
> also counting on its Internet operations to breathe new life into its
> gargantuan but aging Windows and Office franchises.
>
> In a strategy developed largely by Ray Ozzie, who has succeeded Bill Gates
> as the company's chief software architect, Microsoft is trying to create
> online services that are the equivalent of an operating system - a
> platform that other companies can use to develop their own Web sites using
> Microsoft's powerful data centers. It wants to sell advertising that will
> appear on these independent Web sites and in Microsoft's own software and
> video games, as well as its own Web site. And it wants to use its online
> services to freshen up its own software.
>
> This thinking led Microsoft to create a new brand, Office Live, to
> incorporate the online extensions of Word, Excel and other business
> services. And it repackaged its e-mail, instant message, blogging and Web
> search services under the brand Windows Live, supplanting the venerable if
> musty MSN.
>
> "There are a billion Internet users in the world, and a lot of those PC
> users are running Windows," explained Kevin R. Johnson, who oversees the
> 20,000-employee division responsible for the Windows operating system as
> well as the online unit.
>
> Once traditional software is complemented by services delivered online, he
> said, "it's a pretty logical thing that people would say, Hey, I've got
> Windows and here's a set of Windows Live things that extend those
> services."
>
> Yet what seems logical at Microsoft seems like a marketing gaffe to most
> of the advertising and search industry.
>
> Kevin Lee, the chairman of Did-It, a search marketing agency, said neither
> MSN nor Windows Live would appeal to consumers in a market where Google
> has become a synonym for Web search. "People don't see Microsoft as the
> place you search," Mr. Lee said. "MSN is not a verb, and neither is
> Windows Live."
>
> Mr. Berkowitz does not defend the brand choice he inherited.
>
> "I don't know if Live is the right name," he said, saying he had not
> decided what to do about it. But before he gets around to deciding whether
> to change the brand, he wants to make Microsoft's search engine itself
> more appealing to consumers.
>
> What he did decide was to keep the MSN name afloat, too, as it is well
> known and its various services have 430 million users around the world. He
> promoted Joanne K. Bradford, Microsoft's head of advertising sales, to
> oversee and revive the MSN portal.
>
> "I have all these users who come to MSN and a very small subset of them
> use our search," he said. "My No. 1 strategy is to keep these people from
> leaking."
>
> So for now, Mr. Berkowitz has decreed that Microsoft will promote at least
> two Internet services. MSN, in Mr. Berkowitz's conception, is a
> conventional portal with links to programming on various topics that
> competes with Yahoo and AOL. Windows Live, which uses the Live.com site,
> is meant to look much like Google, a spare-looking page that can be
> customized with modules from various services and news feeds.
>
> Reflecting the many conflicting strategies, Microsoft's Internet unit has
> been slowed by the same sort of organizational drag that caused the latest
> upgrade of Windows to fall years behind schedule. And of course, the
> competitive pace of the Internet is far faster than that of operating
> systems.
>
> "Microsoft has a really slow cycle speed," said Rishad Tobaccowala, chief
> executive of Denuo, a consulting arm of the Publicis Groupe, while its
> archrival Google moves much more quickly.
>
> At the same time, Microsoft has had duplicated and overlapping products,
> like multiple ways to share photos, listen to music or search computer
> files, as well as multiple toolbars for Internet browsers.
>
> "We have three different toolbars that approximately do the same thing,"
> said Gary Flake, the head of Live Labs, Microsoft's Internet research
> unit. "If I have a hard time articulating to a friend of mine which one
> they should be using, imagine the typical user."
>
> Even as the company's leaders tried to rally a charge against Google, the
> staff was hampered by conflicting priorities and overlapping
> organizations, employees said. Moreover, last summer, when Microsoft's
> stock fell after it disclosed a sharp increase in research spending,
> directions changed again.
>
> "They had a lot of new initiatives, and people ran fast out of the gate,"
> said Niall Kennedy, an expert on Internet publishing who joined Microsoft
> last spring but quickly became disillusioned and quit in August. After the
> stock fell, he said, "I wasn't able to hire anybody for my group."
>
> Mr. Kennedy says this culture is inhospitable for talented engineers.
>
> "Microsoft is no longer the primary place for technical talent," he said.
> "If there is a superstar, Google will be on their minds." (Indeed, Google
> has set up shop in Kirkland, Wash., six miles from Microsoft's
> headquarters in Redmond, specifically to welcome Microsoft refugees.)
>
> Certainly, Microsoft does have some online strengths. Its e-mail service,
> built on its Hotmail acquisition, is a strong No. 2 to Yahoo. Its
> instant-messaging service, while well behind AOL and Yahoo in the United
> States, leads in many countries in Europe and Asia. And its blog service,
> born as MSN Spaces and now known as Windows Live Spaces, is growing
> rapidly.
>
> Still, the average MSN and Windows Live user in the United States spends
> less time on Microsoft's sites now compared with a year ago, according to
> comScore MediaMetrix, even as Yahoo and Google increase the engagement of
> their users.
>
> One reason Microsoft's use is flat is that it is receiving less promotion
> from its Internet Explorer browser and from Windows. In recent years,
> computer makers have started changing the default settings on their
> browsers to point to Google and Yahoo (which pay big sums for the traffic)
> instead of MSN. All the Internet companies, meanwhile, are promoting
> toolbars and other software that help attract traffic.
>
> Now Microsoft is introducing its much anticipated Windows Vista, but under
> pressure from antitrust regulators, especially in Europe, Vista will
> hardly promote Windows Live at all. The new version of Internet Explorer,
> for example, offers users a long list of search engines, with Windows Live
> listed alphabetically between Lycos and Yahoo.
>
> So with a confused brand and little help from Microsoft's core business,
> the biggest challenge for Mr. Berkowitz is to make a search engine that
> people will choose over Google and Yahoo.
>
> Four years ago, Microsoft embarked on what it called Project Underdog,
> building its own search engine from scratch. It thought it could match
> Google in the relevancy of search results - the crucial measure of a
> search engine - in two years.
>
> So far, all this work has not impressed either consumers or search
> experts. Danny Sullivan, a longtime search expert who writes the blog
> SearchEngineLand, said that in relevancy of results, Microsoft ranks
> behind Google, Yahoo and Ask, in that order, although the gap has narrowed
> some.
>
> "They have gone from a laughable search engine to a credible search
> engine," Mr. Sullivan said. "It is not embarrassing anymore, but they are
> still a little behind."
>
> And a test of consumers, by Enquiro, a search engine marketing firm, found
> that even people who said they preferred to use Microsoft's search engine
> actually found what they were looking for faster when they used Google.
>
> Mr. Berkowitz acknowledges that "what Google does better than anyone is
> getting the basics right." But he says this advantage will not last.
>
> "Now more and more people are getting the basics right. What Google has
> forgotten is how to take it to the next level of differentiation."
>
> This differentiation, he said, is less about extraneous services like the
> 3-D maps and more about changes to the way basic search results are
> presented. This strategy helped him build a small but loyal audience at
> Ask Jeeves, where he introduced several features like the ability to see a
> preview of Web pages found by the search engine.
>
> "You don't win in the first 90 percent; it just gets you in the game," he
> said. "What matters to people is emotional attachment. And I think that's
> the last 10 percent."
>
>
>
>