BERKELEY, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- There is no way Google will not be the primary beneficiary of the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal. With a market share for search at almost 79%, you can be sure it will go up, not down, after the pact unveiled this week takes effect.
The rationale is simple: There will only be two major search engines in competition instead of three. If Google could so thoroughly dominate two competitors, what happens when there is only one target?
Say a big bully is beating up two small kids to take their quarters. It isn't going to help for one small kid to give the other small kid all the quarters.
All we are left with after this deal was done are fewer options for general search. We have Google and Bing, the alternative offered up by Microsoft . Nobody is switching to Bing. Google still has better results for most of us.
Let's get one thing straight: For a search engine to be successful against Google, it has to show noteworthy superiority. Bing actually shows no superiority whatsoever.
It's been pointed out over and over again that during the Michael Jackson is dead moment, Bing was clueless.
For some reason Microsoft seems to think that by making the results prettier, people will want to use the system more. Aesthetics only comes into play as a factor when all things are equal and you need an edge. All things are not equal.
The market seems to agree with my assessment. Yahoo is way down and Google is way up. Microsoft, seen as the beneficiary of the deal, is also up, but only by a fraction.
There is some thought that the only reason Yahoo did this deal in the first place was someone was looking at the numbers there and did not like what they were seeing. They sent up a flare in desperation.
This has either got to be wrong or the company is out of control. Yahoo, in fact, has some of the smartest people working there with some tremendous ideas. Check out for example.
If there has been a problem with Yahoo, it has always been organizational, and I've never been that jazzed about their ability to sell advertising. It's all low-end mass market ad sales.
Also, they've bought too many companies over the years that they could not manage or properly integrate or monetize. They cannot even manage to copy Google's Adsense program so people actually want to use it.
How hard can it be? See what Google does, then copy it! Hello?
Either Yahoo folks think they can do it better (even though they have never exhibited this ability in the past) or they actually don't see it as important.
The irony here, of course, is that Microsoft is going to use the Yahoo people for its sales and marketing side of the business. The blind leading the blind.
Unless Yahoo has decided to go in a new direction, none of this makes sense to me. Yahoo can still go back to its roots: community. People keep forgetting that Yahoo has always been about community.
Yahoo began not as a search engine company but as a directory company which looked and acted a lot like a search engine. They popularized the search box.
But behind it all were lots of people who were experts and who put together collections of links that might relate to a specific topic. If you wanted the best sites on sewing machines, you'd find them on Yahoo.
Eventually, Yahoo evolved into one of the best search engines until Alta Vista, and then Google came along. Microsoft in this scene was the pesky little rich kid who kept wanting to hang out with the bigger boys.
During the dot-com heyday, Yahoo acted like a drunken sailor on his first shore leave after a year at sea, and by that I mean irresponsibly. They expanded, bought companies left and right and never developed a useful organizational structure that worked.
Bartz may have figured out that she won't be able to fix things and might want to remake the company in her own image. The first thing to do was to get rid of search.
When Terry Semel took over the company and decided to make them into a media company the likes of which Hollywood had never seen, he took Yahoo off the track. Now the company appears to be completely derailed.
The Google Express train, meanwhile, is headed back to 500 and beyond. Oh, and Microsoft goes "Bing!"
No comments:
Post a Comment