Microsoft Acknowledges That There Are Other Search Engines Out There, Sort Of
from the ad-me dept
Last month, a much-hyped partnership between Salesforce.com and Google turned out to be a real snoozer, when it was revealed that the tie-up would simply offer Salesforce.com customers a better way to manage their AdWords campaigns. One aspect of the deal that was troubling was that it belied the myth that all these various web services are so easily mashed up. After all, why should Salesforce.com have to sign a deal with Google to offer AdWords management? Ideally, any company would be able to offer this functionality. Today, Microsoft announced enhancements to its own AdManager service, which allows users to manage advertising campaigns on Microsoft's search. Now, however, customers can buy ads for Live search and for Ask.com. It's really great that Microsoft is taking this big tent approach, acknowledging that there are other search engines out there that customers would like to buy ads on, but it's still missing a couple -- Google and Yahoo come to mind. Ultimately, if it wants AdManager to be a valuable service, then it should allow customers to manage as many different campaigns as they want, through any search engine. This piecemeal approach, allowing customers to buy ads on different Microsoft-approved sites, isn't going to get the company very far in its software plus services strategy.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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The first steps....
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Atleast they tried
I use the big 3 to advertise on and google i feel is the easiest to manage then microsoft and then yahoo. Tried ask's and went back to google to manage those ads...
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As always though, there are exceptions to every rule - but with 90% desktop-share in a tech-driven world, makes anyone who knows the in's & out's of Microsoft products, much more richer than the person who does not - or - will not educate themselves in such.
Business as usual...
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Re:
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Why?
I bet if Ubuntu started selling their product and became enormously successful, you'd be against them also.
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open standard, open search, open mind
It is important that your customer has choice and simplicity when using any tools, thus allowing Ask.com is a step in the right direction. Ignoring Google and Yahoo is obviously a childish taunt, and shows pretty well that those 2 Search engines are the most popular over MS Live services.
Keep in mind that Ask.com is part of the Barry Diller empire, as is Expedia whch used to belong to MS, and thus Microsoft is more easily able to adopt them as an added search component on AdManager.
But sooner or later, if Microsoft expects to make any headway with this search advertising service they will have to admit Google and Yahoo to the party.
Meanwhile its business as usual in Redmond, keeping heads in the sand, ignoring popular wisdom, and not allowing much consumer choice.
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Baffles me how it is going to work
defaults to MS, where I promptly search for Google then make it the home page. One more search for Firefox, now I'm IE free except for the occasional Firefox unfriendly site. Download the Google tool bar and Ad-block and I'm good to go. Ads? what ads.
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http://luckybonza.com
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