I’ve blogged several times about the over-the-top thinking going on with the TechMeme Leaderboard crowd when it comes to the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo merger. The sensationalism might have encouraged traffic, but much of it sure was borderline business advice. Now that the deal is undone, maybe we can all get back to talking about tech.
Of all the posts I’ve run across, Danny Sullivan gives some of the best perspective on the proposed deal and where things go from here.
I would say that in terms of where I’d like Microsoft to go from here is where I’ve wanted it to go all along. The first step I’d suggest for them is to work with its many MVPs and build an ad system they’d like to use. Start there. It’s simple enough and small enough to keep nimble. I realize that an approach like this doesn’t have the charm that the top 15%, but hey, that’s exactly the thinking that’s gotten Microsoft this far–so it’s time for a change.
I won’t repeat myself yet again why and how this would all work, but it seems so obvious to me.
I’d also recommend to Microsoft to think less in terms of search in the classic Google way, because I don’t even think Google is doing it anymore. There’s more to search than search. Microsoft should think in terms of helping people get to the information that they want to get to and to use it they way they want. I think this suggests more services than just search. Why can’t someone programmatically get to the definition of a word in Live Search? Why can’t they get acceptable hyphenation via a service call? Or just the source code sample on MSDN that use a particular function–again via a call? This type of approach would get a developer like me to use Live “Search.” Is Google really the best at providing reference material? I don’t think so. That’s why Wikipedia had an opening. Microsoft has the same opportunity here, especially if they provide easily reusable components and services, which is something Microsoft is good at.
Virtual Earth is a fairly good example of this. It’s not quite right though if you ask me. Would I point any of my GPS-enabled programmer/bicycling friends to it? No. Why? Because it doesn’t do what they want and to make it do what they want is too much work.
And what about something like math? There’s a reason why my Silverlight-based Math Tip points to Google and not Live Search for getting math results. Microsoft misses the boat here again and makes it too hard to try to even kludge something up. It’s possible, but why bother. Just use Google.
Live Mesh or not, there are tons of these little services that are ideal for Microsoft or Google or Yahoo to do. Maybe some day.