I wanted to blog about this musing earlier. However, other competing priorities delayed this.
MSFT has just 5% of the search engine marketshare and wants to expand it to a formidable # 2 slot. Currently, Yahoo has #2 slot and has expressed its dissent in joining hands with Microsoft.
MSFT has resolved to alternative means to capture market share - cash back ! An interesting thought in a dwindling economy and the most bang for the buck as it targets the highly lucrative click-thru-to-revenue.
How can they expand the volumes for the same?
1. Targeting gems at the bottom of the pyramids: I mean the emerging economies !
For instance, if the MSN folks can make their finance site for India better, they will be able to eat up that entire market. Google has no product for that market and the Yahoo product is appalling.
Another example is if MSN can introduce bill-pay for Indian service providers. The population will happily get onto MSN site for paying bills at nominal premiums of INR 10 or a quarter.
2. Focusing their information security dept's innovation to online payment safety.
What is still lacking in their product?
accuracy:
As against the rival Google, the accuracy of the Live search product is inferior. For instance, I gave a search string of "Sony Cyber-shot W120 Black 7.2 MP". Despite of the fact that the product was available on the website, it wasn't the first one that came up. It came up way at the bottom of the page and that too, I had to scroll down. At Google, the only product in response to this search string was the one I was looking for.
This reminds me that "attention" is a pricey commodity for which every advertiser is craving for. If the search result is not at the top then it loses the relevance.
cheapest prices:
Also, the price was not comparing itself to other deals that may be available. However, that's a flaw that even Google has. Google checkout had higher prices for this search than Microsoft search.
I think that MSFT can innovate on the cheapest prices point to get an edge!
4 comments:
in terms of price comparison, do you know about froogle? It's google's price checking search engine. It does a pretty nice job pulling prices from around the web. I think it's a good example of building a base product (search engine) and then building some more specialized search engine products as companions. That way, you don't muck up your nice search engine by trying to do too much, and people still have somewhere they can go to get what they want.
Amazing ... have eventually become a fan of your blog ..... :) :)
I understand what u said ....but business is not always about the product it is also about consumption ...in the current times of oil crisis the next hit would be at electricity and maintaining huge datacenters should be the key for any market player ......
A key for Google, Yahoo , MSFT would be to migrate their datacenters to places where cheap hydropower is available ....
Just a thought which struck my mind .....
Thanks
@penn:
I concur.
@alchemist:
right-placement of datacenter is a complex matter and cost of electricity forms only a very small part of decision making inputs.
The geopolitical uncertainty of a developing nation such as India would deter Yahoo, Goog, or MSFT to run their data centers from there.
Besides, data centers are mirrored all across the world for availability performance.
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