Erik Selberg works at Microsoft on the Live.com search team.
What's Live.com? you may ask. Live.com is MSN search rebranded.
Erik responded to a Danny Sullivan chart showing MSFT's latest search share sinking into the ground, and he posted some comments at Greg Linden's blog.
Erik posits the following questions:
the three questions that everyone asks me about search when they find out I’m from Microsoft are:
- Will Microsoft beat Google?
- How will Microsoft beat Google?
- When will Microsoft beat Google?
Let me answer them: Maybe. By building products customers prefer over Google. Not soon.
Maybe?!? I'd answer these questions with a "NEVER." It is NEVER going to happen that somehow MSFT search will go from 12% share and declining to beating Google's 60% share.
Microsoft has already lost. It's way too late, and Erik saying that it wasn't realistic for them to catch Google in 2 or 3 years (contra the typical meaningless Ballmer boosterism - "In the next six months, we'll catch Google in terms of relevancy" - Jun '06) is proof.
Erik's right in his hedge about "by building products customers prefer over Google", but Microsoft just doesn't do that.
He's also right that the Ballmer fantasy time frames weren't realistic, because they are Microsoft, and despite having a $5B/yr research budget and spending hundreds of millions of dollars on search, they cannot INVENT the thing that will displace the product created by the much more focused, nimble and innovative team at Google.
Obviously, the game is past the feature complete problem (and Live.com search isn't really close to Google on relevance, or resistance to spam). The search game is now distribution.
Google has simply outperformed Yahoo and Microsoft by a mile in doing distribution deals this year. They've done the following:
- AOL deal
- MySpace deal
- YouTube deal
- Dell deal
And they still have Mozilla / Firefox in their back pocket, and their toolbar distribution is running slightly ahead of Yahoo! (Meanwhile, Google corrupted the blogosphere with the immensely successful AdSense system, while Yahoo and MSN barely made a peep.)
So in sum:
- Google has a better product
- Google has a better brand
- Google has much more inventory
- Google has way better monetization
This game is over, MSFT has lost on product, and it's lost on distribution. Google is not AltaVista, they are not Yahoo circa 1999.
Microsoft has to find the next game. Of course, being Microsoft, they will never do that either.
PS. This post is in honor of today being the first day of the official Vista launch.
¶ 11/30/2006
