What would you do with eighty million dollars? Improve your product, or advertise what you have? But, suppose that you already hose capital into your product, what then? What if no matter your efforts your product was always third rate? Well, Microsoft decided that instead of taking those 80,000,000 dollars and investing them into their search platform, they would launch an advertising campaign. Really?
I am a Windows advocate (often it seems the only one, but that is a different story), and have long been a self branded mild Microsoft fanboy. This time, I feel let down. Eighty million is a mind popping sum, and they are wasting it. Even if it does raise Microsoft’s search market share, it does little to address the problems that Microsoft has in search, namely that their search engine is not as good as the competition. Snazzy ads will not convince me that Google search is inferior to Live search.
Instead, I would invest the money into Live Image Search, which is in fact a very promising product, and the UI of their standard web search. You could do both with eighty million dollars. Hell, they could build a whole new damn search engine for that amount of money. Big companies get their calibration broken sometimes, Microsoft has, as the saying goes, “forgotten the value of a dollar.”
Can someone remind them that smoke and mirrors oft a broken product sells, as long as the ad dollars keep rolling in. But after they loose this block of cash, what then? Their search capabilities are going to be the same: not good enough. Come on MSFT, build a better mousetrap and then tell the world about it. You are doing this backwards.
