John Battelle’s Searchblog — When Microsoft (and Yahoo) Are Sucking Wind, Is It Fun to Be Google?

29 January 2007
When Live Search launched, I was happy to see how the company positioned search as in the early stages of development (sure, they quoted my book, so that helped). But since then, it’s been mostly bad news for Live Search. A reader (thanks Michelle) pointed me to this Cnet story. In it, the author describes what most of us already know - that Microsoft has continued to lose search market share, and further, that some analysts believe that the Live brand has confused the public.

“Microsoft’s Live branding has been tremendously confusing and has hurt the company, and it is very likely contributing to the situation they are in right now,” said David Smith, an analyst at Gartner. “They’ve created another brand and have not differentiated it.”

There’s more like this in Batelle’s article and the comments to it. The criticism of Microsoft’s product naming policy is valid but I feel its importance is being overstated. The truth is that Microsoft has, in Google, come up against a competitor as determined, ingenious and energetic as it once was.