The American Frank

Or, The Soul of MSN,Yahoo Trails

& Language of Internet Searches

Copyright by Frank A. Hilario
Published by American Chronicle
February 11, 2006

WHEN MICROSOFT SPEAKS, THE WHOLE WORLD LISTENS.

Proof: About the change of plan of Microsoft regarding MSN, I searched the Net and found that thousands of papers worldwide carried the news before and after the actual announcement on 10 February. MSN may be in trouble, but Microsoft isn’t. Apparently not. I think there is only one fellow who can out-news Bill Gates, and that is Steve Jobs. I’m impressed with the genius of Jobs in creating and marketing; I’m impressed with the genius of Gates in marketing. I will point to a unique difference between the two: Steve Jobs makes the news, Bill Gates makes the searches. How good is Bill? Join me as I look at the electronic files in the folder named BILL GATES, SEARCHER.

Steve Jobs is up there in revenues with the iPod and Bill Gates is down there with MSN. Ina Fried (CNET News) writes of ’stratospheric iPod sales’ (10 million the last time I looked) ; I can write that revenues from Yahoo Searches reach the troposphere, but I can only write that revenues from MSN Searches reach the top of Mt Everest (I’ll show you the data I have personally collected in a little while). Meanwhile, there are now 400 accessory products offered for the iPod, which has created an ‘iPod economy’ (Steve Jobs, quoted by Ina Fried). I see signs of an ‘MSN economy’ but it’s not vibrant, it’s like stagnant.

THE UNHAPPY STORY OF MSN

I think Bill Gates is more worried than jealous. So he wants to rewrite The Sad Story of MSN. He needs a good writer to do that. He will need more than hundreds of millions of dollars to build MSN into what it should be.

Bill Gates has just announced that he plans to ‘rebrand MSN’ (Allison Linn, Associated Press). His new MSN head, John Nicol, says Microsoft’s Internet portal will focus on providing content such as entertainment, home videos, money, lifestyle, travel, sports, and/or some ‘user-generated content’ (Richard MacManus, ZDNet). Niche marketing I think they call it.

In short, the plan is for MSN to become ‘an entertainment hub’ (Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Watch), ‘an entertainment destination for consumers’ (Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News). Will the consumers be entertained? That is assuming that MSN knows what kind of entertainment Internet customers want.

Speaking for Microsoft, Kathy Gill says, ‘There will be investments going forward so it feels like a media network, but it will still be MSN. ‘ That means brand change but no name change. John Nicol has been hired to ‘bring out the soul’ of MSN, ‘to build this network into what it should be’ (Elinor Mill, CNET News). He says, ‘Our mission is to be the best at anticipating what our viewers most want to see, read, interact with on the Internet, and allow them to participate in its creation. ‘ Like Windows, can MSN reboot and not crash afterwards?

I have been following off-and-on what’s happening to Microsoft and Microsoft software since about 1987, when I switched to Microsoft Word v1 from WordStar v4. You have no idea how difficult that was, as switching software is hell. Word v1 was unknown to me while WordStar v4 was already a delightful huge jump from WordStar v3 – amazingly, you could now create your own macros, like saving the file and at the same time going back to exactly where you were a moment ago. That’s routine now; you don’t need a macro to do that today. Times change. Well, Word has proven to be the best of them all as far as I’m concerned. I find it perfect using it as my desktop publisher for technical journals and books. When Microsoft is good, it’s very, very good.

Almost genius, I say. Because something is wrong there somewhere. Any name change for MSN isn’t going to work at all; rebranding will work only so much. MSN must transform itself into something very different from what it is today – a little different from the others.

Clue to the needed transformation: Reuters refers to the company as the ’software maker Microsoft Corp’ in one news item. Reuters is inadvertently right! The way I look at it, Microsoft looks at herself only as a software maker, and that’s boxing itself in. It cannot think out of the box because it likes the box. I have yet to see eye-popping originality from any of its software, including Windows and Word and MSN: I don’t know any of the three is highly original in concept. There is super-creativity in that Redmond universe, but I have to see it emerge from the ghosts of Windows past.

Microsoft’s creativity is focused on being better, smarter, or sexier than Yahoo and even Google and all the rest of them. Not good enough.

And if that’s not enough, here’s for some rude awakening, and this is the personal data I promised you earlier. Watch the figures.

Digital Home quotes the Nielsen/NetRatings report on online searches in the US alone as going up to 6 billion in December, and this is the sharing among the Big 3 search engines competing:

2.5 billion Google Searches
1.1 billion Yahoo Searches
0.5 million MSN Searches.

Google has almost 42%, Yahoo has 18%, and MSN has a measly 08% of the total Internet search market. That is probably why somebody thought MSN must rebrand to gain market share. Elinor Mill (CNET News) quotes John Nicol as saying, ‘We don’t have the best navigation tools to link content. ’ That’s grossly understated. Go figure.

Yes, rebranding is the least of Microsoft’s worries. The Nielsen data makes clear that Microsoft is not catching up with the customers. Microsoft has just missed history, missed a watershed in the continuing growth of the Internet. According to Ken Cassar of Nielsen/NetRatings, ‘Online search is the primary tool most people rely on to do everyday research’ (Jennifer LeClaire, Tech News World). I’ll correct that a little and say that online search HAS BECOME the primary tool for everyday research: it wasn’t that before. As LeClaire quotes Cassar as saying, ‘The double-digit increase in online search activity marks a significant milestone in the evolution of Internet consumer behavior. ’ The age of the Internet Search is here! And this is exactly the time when Microsoft has been caught napping.

THE HAPPY STORY OF GOOGLE

I’m not finished. Now, some waker-upper statistics from me; I did this on my own; it has to do with searches still. I didn’t plan on this; it’s serendipity. Borrowing from chess, I shall call it Hilario’s Gambit, as it is like a game opening in which minor pieces are offered in exchange for a favorable position:

(1) Hilario’s Gambit #1: I typed “msn” (lower case, excluding the quotes) and compared results. Google News Search gave me 14,100 hits in 0.18 seconds; MSN News Search gave me 5,268 hits in 0.95 seconds – searching for itself, MSN took 5.28 times longer to come up with 2.68 times fewer items. Not only that (I repeated this step just to make sure) : Page 1 of the MSN results gave me 2 hits on fishing! MSN IS FISHING. It’s hilarious.

(2) Hilario’s Gambit #2: I gave MSN another chance at winning the game, this time on a very personal note, as you will see. I typed exactly as you see below, one line, including the double quotes and the spaces, because I wanted the power of Advanced Search:

“fuzzy logic” “avian flu” murder fowl

What is that? That is a weird combination of keywords or search words, don’t you think? Impossible to find. Of course. Precisely! That’s exactly why I used them for Advanced Search. I wanted those Big 3 search engines to find an article I personally knew was in the Internet. I thought: If your search engine can find a weird line of search words like that, I’d say you’re a genius.

And the Oscar for Stellar Performance in an Informatic Role goes to?

Not MSN: couldn’t find it.
Not Yahoo: couldn’t find it either.

Google News Search found it! What was impossible to find took only a split second. That’s why I say the Google Logic is perfect. Sheer genius.

In other words, Google found ME. My column, published 2 hours ago (according to Google) as I write these lines (first draft, 2305 hours 11 February Manila), is titled ‘Fuzzy logic & the avian flu. Or, Murder most fowl! A study in the language of science’ and appears in American Chronicle (CA) online. And so, my online study in the language of science has become a perfect online study in the language of the Internet search, because who would ever think of putting together these terms and words – fuzzy logic, avian flu, murder, fowl, study, language, science – in one continuous article? Only I, me, myself. You see, in my line of work, creative writing, you don’t have to be crazy, but it works! Try it yourself. (I learned that when I was a copywriter a hundred years ago, much from Edward De Bono’s lateral thinking, when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were just contemplating the Apple I; they were eventually to write the happy/sad story of Apple Computer.) Insane. So you see, I’m the perfect examiner of the soul of MSN along with that of Google and Yahoo.

Google’s soul is white hot. Google must know what more millions of Internet customers want. Brilliant, I’d say. When Google searches, the whole world glistens in the eye.

Poor Microsoft. I think they have been asking the wrong persons when it comes to what the customers want. So, my free, unsolicited advice to Bill Gates is very brief, exactly 13 words:

‘Don’t ask the nerds like me – we know too much to know more.’

25 June 2006