Microsoft Does it Again

Now it is REALLY making sense why many of my contacts and old friends have left Microsoft within the last year. They still don’t get it. While there is still talk of a merge/buyout with Yahoo! to better compete with Google (wait, together you don’t have enough market share to even make Google nervous, why do you think that would change working together?) Microsoft continues to act like a child with ADD.

Seriously distracted.

Instead of focusing on fixing their worthless search engine that is now more than two years old and still doesn’t work, they go out and launch another one. Oh yeah, and that one is broken too. Empty pop-ups that display, overwritten search results with overlaying ads, poor results, etc.

If it wasn’t obvious they hired the wrong people before, it is really obvious now. If I was hired as the lead consultant, I would offer the same advice to Microsoft as I would to Yahoo!. “You don’t have the right people and you don’t have the time to hire the right people and start over. Dump the organic search and move to a strict paid model.”

They could also offer a model where based on monthly spend they could submit “x” number of pages through an XML feed to be indexed for free to help “back fill” searches that do not have advertisers. While small business would “cry fowl” that they can’t compete with big business, it is time for them to wake up anyway. Know your market and how to achieve the market share you can fill properly. Usually big buisness is too stupid to know of the right market.

A line in this mess has to be drawn somewhere.