Alex Gomes >> Blog

But this time Microsoft is going to fail. And here are 10 good reasons why.

1. This isn’t the 90’s. Moderate product does not cut it anymore. Vista maybe nice but really nothing to look forward for, no giant step.
2. Win 3.1 was a leader, Win 95 eliminated DOS, Win 98 was about browser war, Win ME was for Y2K, Win XP just eliminated years of software bugs that Microsoft promised for a long time. What can you say about Vista.
3. XP works pretty well, too well sometimes. A stable system, worthy of praise.
4. With Vista, you can only reinstall once. So when your system corrupts in six months, good luck.
5. You need a supper computer to run vista. Oh well, thats how you going to feel with your pocket book.
6. The anti-piracy features for DVD and digital media locks you out of your own box/dvds.
7. The $5-10 billion dollar MSN Live search engine is broken. That fact itself tells you what you need to know about Microsoft.
8. There will be another Windows in 2-3 years, its not worth upgrading now, you have waited so long.
9. Black Friday, Christmas, New Year, tax season gone. Now you release Vista. Is there any worse time?
10. What extra feature from XP are you going to really enjoy for that amount of money? Is some fancy menus, worth forking so much money?

For the record: I haven’t used Vista yet, and probably won’t buy one. I will however get free legal copy to play with. I will keep XP for a long time.

I am mad with MSN Live. Not only is it ugly with nonsense GUI, but the search feature is now useless. MSN live just dropped two of my largest network from there index, and they were non spam, under Alexa 100k rank. Its just not only me, but whole bunch of websites have disappeared from MSN Live. How can you take a decent product and make it worse?

Microsoft, please hire some professional, even a 10 year old can write better search engine than you.

Now I don’t generally care about MSN traffic, if there is any. But I do care about my brand. I care when somebody searches for mybrand.com and it does not come up on MSN Live. I do care for customers who will be using Vista next year and use MSN Live via there IE default toolbar(Conveniently provided by Microsoft). I care when mydomain.com does not come up for “My Domain”.

Please clean up your act for everyone’s sake.

Microsoft is in talks with Yahoo to have some kind of merger. This would make no. 1 Yahoo and no. 3 MSN more competitive to the challenge posed by Google

I don’t think its going to happen anytime soon, because the price tag for Yahoo would be more than $45 billion. It would make one the most expensive acquisition in history.

It would not work if Microsoft partially invest in the company(like 20% stake). Since the web is the future, Microsoft has to go all the way or not at all. Microsoft would not be able to keep one leg in MSN and another leg in Yahoo. Two brands would just compete with each other.

Now Microsoft doesn’t have any choice. Microsoft has to take the leadership on the web or cease to exist, in a sector where its not been successful. Make no mistake, Google OS is on its way. If its successful, it would kill the cash cow Windows and Office. $45 billion acquisition in that light for $242 billion company is not that big price to pay for the survival of Microsoft.

MSN just came out with a killer application, actually no, but this might what finally kills Google. For few hours on March 6, 2006, MSN allowed advertisers and beta testers to signup to there new services, MSN Adcenter. This is MSN’s answer to Google Adwords and Yahoo’s Overture.

MSN Adcenter lets publishers advertise there website in MSN Network (MSN, MSN Search, Hotmail etc). In the future, advertisers would also be able to advertise in third party websites. Well I tried Adcenter on March 6, 2006. It’s was little bit fun and already lot different than what Google and Yahoo offers. Very easy to use, but there are lot of bugs to be fixed before it goes fully public.

First the account basics:

Campaigns:

Allows you set up ads and campaigns
A very good feature is country/city targeting. But it lacks some popular cities.

The ad setup is four step process; 1) settings, 2) ads, 3) keywords, 4) pricing. There are some targeting features not available in Google and Yahoo but present in MSN. Adcenter has targeting for days and time of the ad impression. You can also setup how you spend your money. You can spread your budget over the month or deplete according to the traffic. Overall Adcenter allows you micro target your ads.

Accounts & Billings:

You add credit cards and account details

Research:

This is interesting as it provides wealth of information not available anywhere on the internet.

You can pull up information about keywords in two ways:

You can type in the URL of the website and it will list the keywords or similar keywords. It doesn’t work very well as of this moment. Lot of work needs to be done

.

You can also type in the keywords directly.

The keywords bring wealth of information. It tells you the frequency in the last months.
Also some other interesting facts

Traffic Trends: The frequency of keywords over time
Age and Gender: This is golden information not available anywhere else, and pretty accurate, except for the male/female ratio.
Geography: Most popular originating cities of the visitors.
Wealth Index: Classifies if the demographic is rich/poor/etc.
Lifestyle: Life style of the users.

Reports:

I haven’t spent any actual money yet, so haven’t tested out this part yet.

There are also lots of bugs that MSN needs to fix.

Bugs:

• Does not work with Mozilla FireFox
• Some US cities not available. I.e. Cary, NC
• “Target an ad to a specific day of the week”- empty time slots
• “Target an ad to a specific time of the day”- empty time slots
• Login Session expires too soon. Not enough time to do any testing.
• Default “Broad” match for keywords can’t be changed

Research

• “Contain Terms” for website come up empty. (This shouldn’t be that difficult to fix.)
• “Similar terms” for website does not work very well.
• “Traffic trends” data is not consistent and not reliable.
• “Geography” and “Lifestyle” data is kind of junk and useless.
• “Females” data in “Age and Gender” seems to be inflated.

Hopefully, MSN will fix the issues before Adcenter goes public.

MSN Search has got lot of heat and scrutiny from the SEO industry. Known as broken engine and spammer’s heaven, MSN has a hard time living up to its expectation. When MSN launched its search engine, I was skeptical. MSNbot was already wrecking havoc to sites all over the net during the beta phase. I was getting few gigs of download from MSNbot every month. Trust me, few gigs of bandwidth doesn’t come cheap and there was very little referral from MSN search to justify this.

A year later, MSN Search has improved a lot. Nowadays if you want to get the freshest result or any breaking news (from website), MSN search is the best place to look. Google and Yahoo have stale result. If a new product is launched, MSN will find it first. MSN still has lot of work ahead. They need to improve there algorithm and fix all the bugs. But there is no doubt that MSN provides the freshest result than any other search engines.