SeattlePI.com — Microsoft falls further behind in Web search

Todd Bishop — 5 March 2007
In early 2005, Microsoft Corp. launched its internally developed Internet search engine with great fanfare, after a large investment. Its goal was to rival Google in the growing and lucrative market.

But two years later, Microsoft has an even smaller slice of the U.S. search market than when it began, based on an analysis of statistics from two major research firms.

Microsoft’s woes will be worsened by the news that Christopher Payne, its corporate vice president for Live Search, is leaving the company.

How this will affect M$’s desktop and enterprise search activities is hard to say. Last year, it tried to set out a common identity and direction for search across its various competing divisions. We thus had the odd spectacle of a software supplier saying that search is a strategic capability for it but there would be no specific search products. The message was that search is part of the operating environment, the infrastructure, and always will be so.

“If that’s the way you want to play it, fair enough”, I thought, “but why all the fuss?” One possible answer is that this was a defensive show against the big predators entering Microsoft’s territory. Oracle, IBM, SAP and various BI suppliers (in cahoots with search suppliers too small to take on M$ themselves) all fancy a mouthful or two of what they see as the Redmondites’ soft underbelly — large corporate systems. Search and related information management products might be their way in.

Like antelopes when there are big cats about, Microsoft’s announcements were a form of ’stotting’ or ‘pronking’, making extravagant leaps to show how healthy and vigorous it is. “Don’t bother with me”, these jumps say, “I’m too fast and strong for you to catch.” It works in the wild but will it in the equally savage world of software sales?

More prosaically, the exercise also reminded me of IBM ‘marketectures’ like SNA and SAA. In those days the joke was that the only hardware such schemes would run on was an overhead projector. Although never as fissile as IBM’s architectures were, Microsoft’s supposed single integrated architecture has always been a a fiction, well short of true homogeneity.