I've seen conflicting reports on whether MSN is gaining or losing market share. But after about 8 months of running its own search engine with a proprietary algorithm, what's interesting is not that MSN Search is still not even close to catching up to Yahoo and Google, but that MSN is losing money. Microsoft's CFO Chris Liddell said the revenue decline resulted not from any change in market share, but rather from the company's inability to translate searches into revenue as much as it would like.
Given a choice between increasing profits from their search business and giving Google a bloody nose right now, or worse, we can be sure it's not an easy decision. Microsoft is the latest high-profile company to line up against Google Print by joining up with the Yahoo-led Open Content Alliance.
Microsoft has committed to paying for the digitization of 150,000 books in the first year, which will be about $5 million, assuming costs of about 10 cents a page and 300 pages, on average, per book. (Yahoo is paying for digitization of 18,000 books.)
Labels: industry buzz
Posted by Melanie Phung
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Microsoft Joins Yahoo Project
I've seen conflicting reports on whether MSN is gaining or losing market share. But after about 8 months of running its own search engine with a proprietary algorithm, what's interesting is not that MSN Search is still not even close to catching up to Yahoo and Google, but that MSN is losing money. Microsoft's CFO Chris Liddell said the revenue decline resulted not from any change in market share, but rather from the company's inability to translate searches into revenue as much as it would like.
Given a choice between increasing profits from their search business and giving Google a bloody nose right now, or worse, we can be sure it's not an easy decision. Microsoft is the latest high-profile company to line up against Google Print by joining up with the Yahoo-led Open Content Alliance.
Microsoft has committed to paying for the digitization of 150,000 books in the first year, which will be about $5 million, assuming costs of about 10 cents a page and 300 pages, on average, per book. (Yahoo is paying for digitization of 18,000 books.)
Labels: industry buzz
Posted by Melanie Phung