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Once again Microsoft arrives late on the scene of a long viable market only to act like they needed to participate to make it legitamate. Billy G said in January that the Redmond gang’s reliance on a Yahoo based search engine on MSN was a mistake. That is true, but it is not just enough to notice the mistake, the goal is to improve on the standard, not try to create a new one. Google is the king of the search engine world for a reason, their’s works, everyone likes it and no one is FORCED to use it. It is called a free market choice, something MS knows little about.

The newly released msn search (search.msn.com - they can’t even make a easy URL name) is not any better then Google, Yahoo, or Ask Jeeves and in many ways is inferior. By Microsoft’s own admission they still need to add features and improve their technology. This is like when IBM came to the mini market back in the mainframe only days and said the market was now legit because they were in it. Microsoft’s pressense is only positive if it makes competition better. If they push others to innovate that is great for all, including themselves, but if they just think that their pressense is sufficent to make something good then they are wrong. No matter the amount of marketing, press, and attention the end user will decide who has the best searches long term and if Microsoft tries to push people to their engine using their browser they are just making the world easier for Firefox (Mozilla / Netscape) and Google / Yahoo / Ask Jeeves as people are beginning to learn to look past the headlines in both their news and their computers.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 1st, 2005 at 3:42 pm and is filed under News, Personal, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.