• Change the look and feel to copy Google. Live.com is the only search engine with a unique color scheme (which I once dubbed "Neptune Morose" for its depressing slate blue & green color scheme). It's also the only one using a different font.

  This hasn't worked. It's time to just switch back to what everyone "knows" a search engine looks like - Google. Yahoo and Ask also look exactly like Google. Microsoft just looks odd.

  By copying Google exactly (including their use of the Golden Ratio in layout), Microsoft can pick up for free all the benefits of thousands of hours of Google usability testing.

Labels: live, msn

¶ 6/12/2007

Randall Stross, who knows a bit about Microsoft and also done some skillful hatchet Jobs takes to the New York Times and rips Microsoft Live search a new one for their announcement that they will pay big IT departments to install Microsoft Live toolbars on all their PCs. The payments will be based on search volume.

IF Microsoft has determined that it is futile to compete with Google head-to-head, and if, as seems to be the case, it is willing to cast dignity aside and adopt marketing gimmicks in an attempt to gain market share, why stop at half measures?

Microsoft is so desperate and incompetent here, that one could almost start to feel sorry for them.

Not really.

Labels: live, microsoft, sucks

¶ 4/04/2007

Mary Jo Foley details the shuffling of deck chairs on the titanic that is Microsoft Live search.

Summary: a red-shirted* VP named Satya Nadella is now in charge of Live search engineering. Good luck buddy.

My initial cynical reaction: "GREAT - let's give the guy who produced that incredible Microsoft CRM product that everyone uses the SEARCH AND AD PLATFORM"

Marketing and branding seem unaffected - but for how long?

* (in the Star Trek sense)

via EZ-E

Labels: live, microsoft, titanic

¶ 3/22/2007