Farhad Manjoo of Time.com says google may have finally found a worthy rvial in microsoft’s bing.
Every year, the market-research firm Millward Brown conducts a survey to determine the economic worth of the world’s brands — in other words, to put a dollar value on the many corporate logos that dominate our lives. Lately the firm’s results have been stuck on repeat: Google has claimed the top spot for the past three years. The most recent report values Google’s brand — those six happy letters that herald so many of our jaunts down the Web’s rabbit hole — at more than $100 billion.
What’s astonishing about this stat is how effortlessly Google seems to have earned the public’s affection. Other companies — Microsoft, Coke, IBM, McDonald’s — spend enormous sums to stay in the consciousness. Google, which makes most of its money from ads, rarely advertises itself. Telling the world how well it does what it does just isn’t Google’s way.
But Google’s humility is being tested as never before. The firm’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., seem besieged by competitors gaining new momentum. Even nominal allies are questioning the company’s motives and long-term plans. In July, Google’s largest competitors, Microsoft and Yahoo!, agreed to work together in an attempt to dethrone it as the world’s dominant search engine. The deal, which awaits government approval, would create a first: a tenacious, well-financed search rival.
Conflicts are beginning to take place in other areas where Google has ventured. That includes e-mail and office programs (Gmail, Google Docs), a cell-phone operating system (Android) and a Web browser (Chrome). Google scans and sells books, runs a phone system and is even working on a desktop operating system to rival Windows. CEO Eric Schmidt recently stepped down from Apple’s board of directors because the two companies now compete in so many areas. The U.S. Justice Department is investigating a legal settlement between Google and the publishing industry over the company’s book-scanning service, and Christine Varney, Justice’s antitrust chief, said she sees Google as a “problem.”
At the moment, Google’s most pressing problem is Microsoft. The software giant is spending $100 million to market its new search engine, Bing — and in the process, to get us all bummed about Google. Bing’s slick ads are unavoidable and blistering. They suggest that Google is broken, that it rarely leads us to what we’re looking for and turns us all into blathering zombies who spew out search keywords in casual conversation.
The blogosphere and the web is abuzz with the Yahoo - MS search deal.
Ballmer and Bartz. (Yahoo photo, via
Flickr)
Yahoo has turned the clock back a few years to outsource the search and search advertising to Microsoft. If this sounds familiar, this is how Google became Google. It got its initial distribution by powering Yahoo’s search in the late 90s.
I understand why MS wants to do this deal. It is less clear to me why Yahoo did this deal. If it is for short term profits then it would have been better off outsourcing it to Google (which it tried to do but google got scared because of antitrust issues). If it is for strategic reason to fend off google, why let MS power the search instead of otherway around? In fact they have more leverage as they have the bigger search market share. After all Yahoo is a tech company. Search is the center piece in all of internet technologies today and Yahoo is outsourcing it to MS. There in lie some clues as to how Yahoo sees itself. It is signaling that we are not good at internet technology anymore and we just want to make money on the users that visit my site while they last. This sounds more and more like AOL to me. You know where AOL is headed.
It is a great deal for MS as they didn’t have to plough all the money to buy Yahoo and a take huge risk to make it work. They just wanted a better shot at competing with Google by becming the #2 player in search. They didn’t have to fork up a single penny to do this. What a deal!
Yahoo without the search asset is far less valuable. You don’t sell your core asset piece meal. Yahoo would have been better off selling the company as a whole. They should have just taken the MS deal offered last year if they are willing to this type of a deal.
Kara Swisher says yahoo and microsoft are in talks to discuss search and advertising partnership.
In early discussions that began in the last several weeks that apparently included a face-to-face meeting last week, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer are finally talking about search and also advertising partnerships the companies could possibly strike, said several sources with knowledge of the situation.
According to a variety of sources, the talks between the pair (pictured here) and also other execs at both companies are preliminary and also wide-ranging, focused on what kinds of commercial relationship Yahoo and Microsoft could have in the future.
But, cautioned sources close to Yahoo, the discussions are not about a renewed acquisition attempt by Microsoft and also might not result in any deal.
In a recent blog post, I asked this question:
Is iphone platform the next windows franchise? If it comes true, then that would be sweet irony for steve jobs.
It seems that microsoft is worried that it may be coming true. They are trying to emulate iphone with their rumored zune phone. Now there is news that microsoft may be opening their own retail stores. They announced the hiring of their retail head.
Microsoft has this DNA of copying. They rarely seem to come up with original products. Just think about it. Windows, IE, xbox, zune, msn, word, excel, sql server, all of them are clones. It is amazing that they are able to build the largest software company by being a follower.
You would think it would be difficult for the world’s largest software company to miss the big techonology waves as they play out over a period of time. But apparently it is easy to miss the waves. They definitely were late to the internet platofrm party (google owns the floor) and they may be late to the mobile platform party (apple owns the floor for now).
How does this happen? It has to with the DNA of company. Microsoft has the DNA of a desktop software company and seems to have a hard time adapting to fast changing technological shifts. When you are still making billions in desktop software it is natural for that DNA to dominate. Apple on the otherhand came back from the brink of extinction (thanks to the return of steve jobs), so they built a DNA that can not only adapt quickly to changing trends but also to set the trends.
Here is an interesting question: is iphone platform the next windows franchise? If it comes true, then that would be sweet irony for steve jobs.
