Microsoft May Do More Shopping
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More large acquisitions may be in the software giant's future.
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While dealing logistically and technically with their overlapping online offerings will certainly prove troublesome&#160;if its bid to purchase Yahoo&#160;succeeds, Microsoft will at least have an immediate outlet for bringing more of its traditional desktop portfolio to the Web and to a broader customer base.Microsoft has been trying for more than two years to find a critical mass to adopt new online services beyond search, e-mail, and instant messaging under the Windows Live brand -- with little success. Its early MSN e-mail and IM offerings are popular enough with Web users; however, users of Google and Yahoo online services have been loath to adopt the revamped Windows Live offerings in favor of the ones they&#39;re already using.Not only could that change if the company purchases Yahoo, but Microsoft also will have a ready-made Web front end for rolling out more of its desktop applications as services, said Paul Fox, CIO of Guy Carpenter, a New York-based reinsurance company.&quot;The Yahoo platform is really what they&#39;re buying,&quot; he said. &quot;With Yahoo, they&#39;re tapping into the base culture of the Internet online community that&#39;s matured over the last 10 years. It&#39;s going to make it easier for people to take a look at and try their services, whereas before it had to be a more conscious effort.&quot;Aside from the usual raft of consumer applications&#160;such as&#160;search, e-mail, maps, and the like, Microsoft already has brought some of its many business desktop applications -- such as Office and CRM -- online in hosted, though often scaled-down, versions.Access to Yahoo&#39;s estimated 500 million visitors per month will give it a new channel to deliver what the company now calls its &quot;software plus services&quot; strategy, as well as buy the company time to bring more competitive versions of applications that were originally coded for the desktop to the Web.Indeed, in the conference call discussing the Yahoo bid Friday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made a pointed reference to efforts to shed its desktop legacy and move even aspects of its Windows OS to the Web, a trend the company started with some features in the latest version, Windows Vista.&quot;The Windows user wants to be live, the Windows experience needs to increasingly embrace the Internet,&quot; he said. &quot;There will be a Windows Live, there will be an Office Live as we continue to bring out innovations in which Office transforms and is transformed by the Internet.&quot;Ballmer also likely had the rising popularity of Web-hosted productivity software, such as Google Apps, Zoho, and&#160;Yahoo&#39;s Zimbra, in mind when considering how to Web-enable Microsoft&#39;s desktop software. So far, Microsoft&#39;s Office Live has been more of a way for small businesses to get up and running with a Web site and basic hosted business applications&#160;such as&#160;accounting and CRM; however, bringing a full productivity suite to the Web has been Microsoft&#39;s plan for some time.Microsoft also can leverage its own strength among business customers to bundle and technically link applications so that customers buy an all-in-one package rather than individual products. For instance, Microsoft has created tight links between a new unified communications product, Office Communications Server, and its Office and SharePoint collaboration software so that customers must buy them all together to create comprehensive infrastructure. Microsoft can make similar attachments between online versions of its applications -- or just bundle them together in creative ways -- and market them to a broader audience.&quot;If Microsoft does something well, it&#39;s bundling products and services,&quot; said Ned May, director and lead analyst of marketing research firm Outsell. He joked that if Microsoft purchases Yahoo, there might come a day when you start up Windows and &quot;up pops Yahoo, and it takes you three days to remove that functionality.&quot;&quot;Yahoo provides a platform in many regards -- an audience of 500 million people to which you can bundle products and new offerings,&quot; May said.Doing quick math, May figured that at &quot;500 million a month for about $44 billion,&quot; it will cost Microsoft about $86 a head for acquiring each member of its new audience of Web users. &quot;Not a bad deal,&quot; he said.
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Microsoft Corp. continues to tweak its volume licensing programs to make it easier for business customers to purchase the company&#39;s software in bulk.
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Software giant readies slew of new products for the holidays and revisits options for major Windows revision, News.com has learned.
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The PC maker is eyeing in-home services to go with its new consumer electronics line.
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You might buy a Mac to get away from Microsoft, but it can be hard to avoid Windows.
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Its new enterprise search appliance has more tagging and customization.
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The world's leading retailer may be ready to nibble at smaller concepts.
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Microsoftâs $1.2 billion bid for a Norwegian search software company is seen as an effort to add tools to its lucrative Office products and fend off Google.
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With its recent acquisition, the software maker may have found something its customers are looking for.
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Blog: Prospective buyers are increasingly inclined to take extra time to search for the best price and features, according to report.
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U.S. retail consumers could begin to see great deals on PC  purchases as the market gets more competitive.
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Microsoft Corp  has showed  early signs of narrowing the gap with Google Inc  in  its Web business, leading Wall Street to ask whether the  world&#39;s biggest software company may be able to turn an  overlooked unit into a financial powerhouse.
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REDMOND, Wash. - Microsoft Corp., stepping up its efforts to compete with rival Google Inc., will offer consumers a preview of its technology for searching the Internet, beginning Thursday.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft thinks its Live Search can match GoogleÂ in some areas now, but the company has been theÂ underdog in searchÂ for so long it's not even trying to lure users away from its rival -- at least not yet. Showing off a dizzying array of tools to reporters and analysts at its Silicon Valley campus in Google's hometown of Mountain View, Calif., Microsoft executives said several times that the company is focused on providing a better search experience for current users of Live Search, hoping toÂ get them to search there more often. The Redmond, Wash., company also wants to lure users of its MSN portal to more frequently use Live Search. They compared Live Search's results to those of Google in some cases and said customer research showed its user satisfaction catching up to Google, but didn't talk about grabbing market share. The numbers are damning: About 37 percent of Web searchers sometimes use Live Search, but only about 11 percent of all searches are done on the site, Microsoft said, citing independent statistics. The average user of Live Search does 15 searches on the site per month, while the comparable number for Google is 55. Microsoft runs behind YahooÂ and Google, and Derrick Connell, a general manager in product management at Microsoft, acknowledged that the search product was actually losing market share in the first four months of this year. But the company hopes to gain ground at least among its current base with the new capabilities. Over the past three years, Microsoft has quietly invested in basic things such as coverage, expanding its index to more than 20 billion Web documents, executives said. But it's more flashy additions in video, health, local search and maps that may help Live Search make an impression. The new video search interface, one of the features to be rolled out gradually to all visitors over the next week, lets users play a preview of each video on a results page just by putting the cursor over the image representing it. Using internally developed technology as it "crawls" a video Web site, Microsoft detects moments in a video that are likely to be highlights, said Mike Nichols, a group program manager in Live Search. Those parts are combined in a 30-second preview that searchers can watch to get an idea of what a longer video is like. Audio peaks, flashes of light and scene changes are among the elements Microsoft's automated system looks for. The previews are cached on Microsoft's own servers for quick playing, he said. Microsoft's new specialized health search engine, to be rolled out the following week, will divide results into separate columns for journal articles, Web results and sponsored results. To address consumer worries about privacy, all searches and results on the health site will be encrypted using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). In local search, Microsoft is using its Virtual Earth tool for richer results. It can project aerial photographs of places on Virtual Earth's navigable three-dimensional maps of major cities, said General Manager Erik Jorgensen. A tool for users to show highlights of a trip, called Collections, will be enhanced so viewers can just click through the trips or passively watch them in a virtual video rather than looking around a map. The maker of a Collection will also be able to upload the virtual video to sites such as YouTube, he said. Local directions will also be enhanced. Rather than make users enter a starting point, Live Search will offer directions from all the major highways, from which users can choose. As an option, the local search engine will also be able to modify those directions in light of current traffic conditions. Local and mapping features will be rolled out by mid-October, according to the company. Microsoft has done a poor job selling its search offerings, and if it has matched Google on factors such as relevance, few people would believe that right now, said Gartner Inc. analyst Van Baker. The new video, health and local search features are impressive and Microsoft is doing the right thing by targeting current Live Search users and MSN portal visitors, he said. "They've got to make sure that [group] is happy first," Baker said. After that, it may be able to convince others that Live Search is worth a try.
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There are ways to look for the better deal in the competitive markets for cameras, televisions and hard drives.
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The software giant's CFO says a target as big as SAP is less likely, but some big buys could be in Microsoft's future.