RSSMicrosoft to Pay Business for Using Live Search
By Ed Oswald | Published March 16, 2007, 4:34 PM
If you can't get people to use your product for free, you can always pay them to.
Microsoft is now offering to pay businesses through service or training credits if they get their employees to use its Live Search product at work. The amount of the payment would be based on the number of search queries served.
While many may view this as a sign of desperation from a company whose search share badly lags behind that of competitors Google and Yahoo, Microsoft is attempting to spin it in a different way.
Currently Google serves about half of all search queries, followed by Yahoo that serves about 24 percent. Microsoft has around an 8 percent search share, Neilsen//NetRatings reports.
The company claims that feedback gained from the program would be used to improve Live Search for enterprise use. However, at the same time the program could raise the company's search share, thus allowing the company to sell more advertising and highlight its other related products.
Furthermore, there is a good chance that if employees become accustomed to using Live Search at work, those habits would carry over to their home use of search engines.
Upon registration, a company would receive a $25,000 credit, and then would be eligible for up to $10 per computer annually for Live Search usage. Companies would also be required to mandate that their users use IE7 while at work.
This could result in hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings for companies with thousands of computers, who traditionally may spend millions on Microsoft products.
"This could work, but it could sure backfire," John Battle of Searchblog wrote Thursday after being alerted to the program.
"How would you feel if, to save a few bucks, the CIO and CFO dictates that you now have to use IE7 preset to Live Search? I can imagine a backlash where usage of Firefox goes way up in large corporations so as to avoid that "Browser Helper Object" installed in IE 7," he continued.
Personally, live search is better for photos then google but since we are talking business probably not a big thing, in all honesty live and google give back mostly the same results and live has a cleaner look to it (granted, this is my opinion)
The funny thing about this is if ANY other company does the same thing you would never see it as news but Microsoft SNEEZES its front page news, seriousily ALL companies when they get as big as Microsoft go this route its inevitable, Google will be right where Microsoft is in terms of flaming in a couple more years.
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|It's simple if I own a company and Googles says i'll pay you for using my search engine the i'd go for it but they don't, the royalty goes to FireFox.
MS is paying me -(my company) - so yes there is royalty there, but I get it not to the vendor of a product i use.
Quite frankly I see large corps going for this hands down.
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|This is very much the same way a Microsoft engineer gets a date.
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|*sigh*
Pathetic, desperate, and nearly as sad as Steve Ballmer's "Google is cute" speech.
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|Exactly, MS is trying anything now to get users to come back. Its hard for them when eveyone else has greener grass...
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|Yes it may seem pathetic, but a lot of you guys fail to realize the will power of microsoft. If I said microsoft will dominant the search market, a lot of you will just laugh, but Microsoft can very well take the market with this offer. $25,000 + $15,000 (1500 computers) = $40,000 savings for using a search engine. How many companies you know are NOT going to take that offer and potentially block google in the proxy?
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|Google is doing the same thing too. If I am not mistaken, every time you search from Firefox, and click one of the PPC ad, Mozilla get a piece of the generated revenue.
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|That is just a royalty for loading Google as the default homepage for FireFox.
Please do some research people before you jump to idiot conclusions...
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|What part of MS strategy is not a royalty program? MS says, you use my search engine, I will reward you. The more you use it, the more reward you get. How is it different?
The editor is well know MS hater. Just do a search on his articles.
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|this is amazing, this is so funny, okay would this be a reverse psychology tactic with microsoft thinking that google will start to do this and maybe lose all the profit they have made, microsoft yet again has proven they are geniuses, dumb a-holes
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|Desperation Indeed! How pathetic to see the once mighty Micro$oft in terminal decline. Steve Ballmer is an embarrassment!
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|replace pay with bribe...
Nothing new in microsoft tactics..
Bribing bloggers for post good stuff about Vista: http://www.theregister.c...crosoft_free_ferarri_pc/
They are also to be rumourd to be paying for bloggers to Sony mud sling...
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|Wait wait wait...aren't you the same guy that said it's crazy to think that some New York Post article is biased towards sony (maybe with some "help")? Nah that couldn't of been you.
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|This is just sad.
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|I'll go for it-- IF Maxthon w/ Live Search is possible.
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|Even more creative than bundling.
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|C'mon everybody knows that Microsoft's search engine sucks. You can't be all things to all men.
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