Ballmer on every good day in Microsoft Search

The loudest CEO around is hosting an employee town hall right now, and he’s addressing a handful of areas where Microsoft can make progress. When talking about search he highlighted an interesting principle, “The market leader has no incentive to disrupt.” While Google will obviously continue to throw maximum resources at improving their search abilities and their model of giving away developed software is hard to answer, they truely don’t want to see the game change.

There’s also a difficult lesson to take from the operating system business that can be applied here: Windows being the strong leader has been a good thing, but Mac OS X has been able to grow significantly through being the underdog and changing the game. It’s not hard to imagine Microsoft being in the same position relative to Google, which gives us huge incentive and opportunity to grow.


This entry was posted on May 15th, 2007 and is filed under apple, google, microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.

 
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5 Responses to “Ballmer on every good day in Microsoft Search”

  1. joeyjoseph
    16. May 2007 at 09:23

    This is assuming search is still the game. Which I think is a big assumption. For techies it might seem so at times, but for everyday users, I wonder if the war is over. Do most people don\’t know or give a hoot about who has the better search algos? Any of the big name search providers do a good enough job for your average person. It seems odd to allocate more resources to something that won\’t Roy you nearly as well as developing something new or some new market.

    Yo loco?

  2. OsakaSteve
    16. May 2007 at 09:34

    From the user perspective I think you\’re spot-on; search is good enough from any of the big three. However I think that given how tightly search and advertising have been coupled together, there\’s too much money at stake to not compete. The evil-business viewpoint is probably this: The more accurate your search, the more targeted your adverts are likely to be, which increases your profitability. The ROI is indirect, but it\’s certainly there.

  3. joeyjoseph
    16. May 2007 at 13:30

    I thought we agreed to spell it ROY dude. NOT cool.

  4. OsakaSteve
    16. May 2007 at 13:43

    Return on Yang?

  5. joeyjoseph
    19. May 2007 at 19:51

    Also, it just hit me why this is so odd. It’s not the pure irony of someone like him talking about market leaders not distrupitng. It’s that he wasn’t eeeeeAAAAAHHHHHhhHHHHHHing. I wonder if age is wearing on him. ?

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