Admit It, Microsoft: You Suck at the Web

http://gigaom.com/2010/01/30/admit-it-microsoft-you-suck-at-the-web/

by hshah • 16 years ago

84 56 16 years ago

aneesh2• 16 years ago

Just because you suck at something doesn't mean you should automatically give up. I think it's to Microsoft's credit that they're continuing to go after search. And they're making progress with Bing, albeit very slowly. I don't see anyone else attacking Google in search.

dotcoma2• 16 years ago

as said in the article, attacking Google in search is not going to get them anywhere. Facebook, or Apple, or Nokia (with its free GPS service on its smartphones) may steal a bit (or a lot, perhaps) of the show from Google, but I doubt Microsoft ever will.

Niten• 16 years ago

But why? Really, is there any fundamental reason we should expect Google to remain perpetually on top of the search engine business?

I think the difference in quality between Google and Bing search results is negligible; at this point it's just a matter of mindshare as to whether people, on average, go to www.google.com or to www.bing.com when they want to look something up. There's no vendor lock-in propping up Google, to the extent that there is behind the Windows or iTunes monopolies. Mindshare can be altered, Microsoft just needs to figure out how to do it.

scrrr2• 16 years ago

For quality search results theres also still http://www.ask.com and http://www.alltheweb.com . I wonder why we hear so little about those.

krakensden• 16 years ago

I've been let down by Ask so many times over so many years (... more than 10?), I do not even think about them.

wgj• 16 years ago

On ask.com I have to scroll the page to even reach the first organic result after the block of sponsored results. If you use it on a regular basis, don't you get tired of doing that?

jbrennan• 16 years ago

Don't ask.

brandonkm• 16 years ago

I agree. Around 2000, I remember reading all these articles in video game magazines talking about how microsoft will never be a major player in consoles. "Microsoft is not a video game company, its not in their dna". Fast forward a bit and look at the console landscape now. 5.5 million xbox 360s were sold in the 4th quarter of 2009. The xbox can now be considered a runaway success, despite the numerous setbacks that have occured (red ring of death).

With search the landscape is a bit different, but we shouldn't be so shortsighted as to count microsoft out of the game or think that bing will never gain >50% marketshare. We could look at articles like this in 3-4 years and laugh out how off the mark it was, just like the articles in game magazines bashing the xbox in the early 2000's.

absconditus• 16 years ago

Has the Xbox division been profitable over its lifetime? I realize that they are supposedly profitable now, but have their recent profits exceeded the previous losses yet?

grhino• 16 years ago

A good part of why the XBOX 360 has done well as a gaming platform is because they were able to leverage the success of the PC as a gaming platform. Of gaming platforms, the PC has been one of the most open and easiest to develop for on the market and a lot of that has carried over to the XBOX.

rabidgnat• 16 years ago

On the other hand, do big companies ever get BETTER at something?

Large companies tend to walk off their own skyscrapers. Microsoft toppled IBM with the "PC on every desk" mantra. In turn, Microsoft never won on the Internet, because they just never understood that humans network. Phone+cable+Internet companies are begging for a sassy upstart to eat their lunch when competition opens up. American car companies missed game-changing trends in consumer automobiles towards fuel efficiency.

Should Microsoft abandon search? Probably not, but they're more likely to make money if they attack markets that only have awful products. Attacking a market with strong loyalties and gold-standard type products seems like a fool's errand

bobbyi• 16 years ago

> Mabye it’s time the company sold off its online division to a company that is just that – like Yahoo.

I don't think Microsoft could find a buyer for its online division.

awa2• 16 years ago

According to the graph in the article they actually made profit in 2004 and 2005 and only a small loss in 06..

I'll admit some of the web products suck (hotmail?) but not bing, they haven't been able to profit from it. I guess currently they are after marketshare rather than profits. Think of it like a startup burning through some initial VC money to get customers except that they have a lot of money to burn!

Disclaimer: They pay my bills, but am not really a fanboy just not anti-microsoft.

kalid• 16 years ago

7 billion is quite a bit of VC money :).

dangrossman• 16 years ago

Hotmail is the second most popular e-mail service on the web, second only to Yahoo! Mail.

awa2• 16 years ago

Popularity of a product is not a true sign of "not sucking" :P

scrrr2• 16 years ago

Microsoft always seems to need one or two attempts before they make a really good product. Win95 -> WinME -> WinXP. Zune -> Zune2. Vista -> 7. They may not be as agile as Google, but a lot of smart people work at MS. I hope they succeed with good search. Google needs some competition.

Having said that: Bing sucks b*s in Germany.

thristian• 16 years ago

So far as I know, the rule was always "don't bother buying any MS software until version 3".

MS-DOS: v1.0, v2.0, v3.3

Windows: v1.0, v2.0, v3.0

Windows NT: v3.1, v3.51, v4.0

Word for Windows: v1.0, v2.0, v6.0

Visual Basic: v1.0, v2.0, v3.0

There's probably other examples, but I'm not sufficiently familiar with Microsoft's other (or newer) products to list them.

mbreese• 16 years ago

I thought it was never buy a x.0 MS product. And in the case of XP, etc... it was wait until the first service pack.

city412• 16 years ago

Pretty much everyone I met at Microsoft was very smart. But at least within my division, the available energy was never utilized very effectively. I always compared it to a muscle car, sure that V8 has a lot of power, but boy that car can't handle for anything.

With that said, you just can't apply blanket statements to the company. "Microsoft isn't good at the web" just doesn't really mean anything. The Bing team is for all intents and purposes, a completely different company from the IE team, from the Xbox and Zune teams from DevDiv... How a given team at MS does largely depends on how effective its management is. Some teams have really effective managers, PMs, and developers that can execute. Others don't. There is very little (almost none) energy, process or direction that gets applied across the entire company.

fauigerzigerk3• 16 years ago

"[...] the available energy was never utilized very effectively"

Doesn't that apply to all big corporations to some degree? I think it's a tradeoff between using each individual's potential and utilizing economies of scale. The latter requires coordination of many people, which reduces the leeway for all individuals involved.

Corporate culture is certainly important, but no corporate culture can completely overcome the limitations imposed by utilizing size. At least that's what the ad-hoc scientist in my head says, you know, the one that never reveals any sources ;-)

metatronscube• 16 years ago

Not the only thing I would say that they "suck at".

benologist2• 16 years ago

You could make the same argument about almost everything Google's done except for search/advertising/youtube.

city412• 16 years ago

And they didn't really "do" youtube, they bought it. The core of the service has remained exactly the same since when it debuted.

Herring• 16 years ago

So what? Microsoft can make & has made acquisitions too. It's not Google's fault that MS is bad at that too.

boundlessdreamz• 16 years ago

Hmm ? Gmail, Docs, News, Reader

Successfully bought and developed

Analytics, Blogger, Google Earth, Picasa etc

aneesh2• 16 years ago

Add Docs to the "bought" list -- that was an acquisition too (of Writely).

fauigerzigerk3• 16 years ago

Do any of those make money?

pvg• 16 years ago

You know what also sucks at the web? Blog posts with a pointless blurry 330 kilobyte PNG at the top.

raganwald• 16 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude ?

Batsu• 16 years ago

I can't help but wonder if we could derive a whole new term specified to Microsoft.

gruseom2• 16 years ago

Bit of a baity article insofar as MS can't "admit" they suck at the web and it would be suicide if they gave up on it.

I have a question regarding Bing, though. A while back, someone here made a suggestion that struck me as brilliant: that Bing provide an option to exclude web pages with Adsense ads on them from search results. This would get rid of untold jungles of webspam and deprive Google of revenue at the same time. Of course it would also exclude many legitimate pages, but webspam has turned into such a horrible problem that at this point I just don't care (especially if the filter were an option I could turn on and off). If MS did this, I would use Bing regularly. I can't think of any other reason to say that.

My question is: what besides accusations of anti-competitive behavior (which strike me as rather weak in this case, MS being far from the monopolist in search) would prevent MS from trying this?

epochwolf2• 16 years ago

I think too much of the web has Adsense on it for that to be a good idea.

gruseom2• 16 years ago

Yes, but pages with Adsense ads on them are of poorer average quality (I'm guessing) because there is so much spam. Google have an obvious conflict of interest preventing them from doing much about this. That conflict of interest is just about my only real grievance with Google; I'm otherwise a happy Google user with no incentive to switch. Why wouldn't MS exploit this? The suggestion isn't that they suppress Adsense pages altogether, just provide an option to filter them out.

akamaka• 16 years ago

Why does everyone forget about Messenger? With about the same number of users as Facebook, it's hardly a failure.

epochwolf2• 16 years ago

Does messenger actually make Microsoft any money?

I have an MSN Messenger account but I never use their client for it. I've always used 3rd party applications.

johnrob• 16 years ago

"Does Microsoft not realize that all the spoils of the mobile web are going to the companies that control the front-end interface — that is, the big mobile OS players like Android and iPhone and not the fringe players like Windows Mobile?"

Sounds like what folks said about desktops in the late 90s. History tells us that the device/PC ends up simply being a way to access the web. Sure, there are always some intensive apps that require the local cpu, but those are rarely for the mass market.

fauigerzigerk3• 16 years ago

Ok, but who, other than Google, does actually make a lot of money on the web? Yahoo is struggling and most of what they offer is generic crap monetizing their old brand.

I have no idea whether Facebook makes any money. It can't be easy judging by their desperate attempts to trick users into doing things that are bad for them.

Twitter should make tons of money considering their service is trivial (I know it's not trivial to operate at that scale) and their mindshare huge. But how much money do they make?

Content creators like journalists, authors or musicians find it very difficult to make money as well.

Amazon does make money, but they are a retailer, not a web company I would say.

In my view, it's an open question whether the ad funded web is a viable business model for a lot of companies or just a niche in which very very few big players make all the money.

Admit It, Microsoft: You Suck at the Web

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