Most of the news from last night’s All Things Digital conference in San Diego, concentrates on the short demo Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer gave of the Windows 7 ‘touch‘ interface.
For me, the most interesting thing about the evening, was a comment Bill Gates made to reporters at an earlier reception. After explaining that he will still have an office at Redmond, he went on to say that he would continue working on a number of pet projects.
Then he said something, which I think is really interesting;
“I’m very involved in search, the internal development,” he said. “We will build the world’s best search.”
Like many people, I was disappointed when Microsoft recently announced that it was going to use what it refers to as a ‘cash back‘ model, to try to gain some marketshare from Google; rather than innovate and make something better.
As Om Malik told the BBC this week; “Microsoft is like a bad restaurant – no matter what the incentive, you don’t want to eat there.
I hope that Bill Gates‘ comments yesterday are a sign that he IS serious about competing with Google, by making a better search product. I certainly hope! As I have already blogged, Google’s near monopoly in the search marketplace is good for no one other than Google.
I keep hearing about Google’s “monopoly” of search but the latest figures I saw said that about 66% of searches were done using Google. That’s a huge share but I was expecting something more like 90%. Yahoo still had about 20% of searches done using their search engine. I wonder if Google has been overhyped because they just make so much damn money. There were about 5 or 6 other search engines listed which had at least 5% share of the search engine market, including MSN.
Thanks for the comment Liz,
No, Google do not have a monopoly.
Google have what is often termed a ‘near monopoly’ of online revenue. It’s bigger than every other search company combined and in some countries their market share is even higher!
Mike Arrington at techcrunch.com wrote a GREAT post about it this week
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/25/the-importance-of-a-competitive-search-market/
There is no single company that seems able to be able to give serious competition to Google and that’s why google advertising costs are going up and up – forcing prices to consumers up, as advertisers try to recoup their increased ad spend.
I have just had a comment on another post, where the guy has seen his google advertising costs increase by over 100%; for the same number of enquiries.
The problem is, he (and everyone else) has no alternative that can generate the number of enquiries that Google can. They can’t go anywhere else because that’s not where people are looking when they want to find something. Hence, the ‘near monopoly’ you keep hearing about.
Google’s search engine is EXCELLENT – I use it and I have done for years. But someone needs to come along with a search engine that can challenge Google – so we have a more even playing field and so that people have some SERIOUS choice with search advertising. That way we all benefit.
Great comment – thank you Liz!
Yeah, this really irks me. It’s sad too that the only way Microsoft can compete with the other innovative incumbents in the search market is to embed the search. They must be hoping the same thing will happen to Google, Yahoo, etc. that happened to Word Perfect with Microsoft Word…Hopefully consumers will see through it.
Hello Nate,
Thanks for the comment.
I just hope we end up with a competitive search marketplace, where innovation is used to gain market share and not just financial muscle.
I like your blog by the way – well worth a read!
SOG knives…
Interesting ideas… I wonder how the Hollywood media would portray this?…
[...] have added approximately a quarter of a billion dollars MORE to Yahoo’s operating profits. As I blogged previously, Bill Gates is now going to remain a part of Microsoft’s attempt to ‘build the [...]