Bribery is never good business

Details: Thursday, 14 April 2011 18:23; Hits: 305

As I am writing this the off-again, on-again Microsoft-Yahoo! deal looks set to keep us going back and forth in our opinions for at least a few more months. AOL is posed to do business with either and Google, the 800-pound gorilla in the search engine park is quietly going about its business rolling out improvements, refinements and new partnerships which are part of a long-term online strategy.

Microsoft, with it deep coffers, is the classic example here of a corporation straying out of its comfort zone and desperately seeking to make an impact through blunt force rather than vision. Almost everything MS has done in the search field area has been a failure and anyone who has been through hoops just so their website can get indexed in the Live Search index can tell them why.

Dominance in search is all about the customer not the provider. As online search users we couldn’t care less how difficult it is to achieve a fast search index, to deliver relevant search results and to get every website that comes online, no matter how seemingly useless it may appear to be, catalogued, appraised and ready to be served to the person looking for the information it may contain.

Microsoft takes the view, interpreted through the poor indexing ability of its search engine, that we just have to be grateful for what MS has indexed and if there are other sits out there which might be more relevant to our search, well, we will just have to wait until Live Search gets round to indexing them.

Beyond the fact that this is arrogance of such magnitude that you feel like firebombing Redmond HQs just to make a point (or better still never even going near the Live Search portal even at gunpoint) it is also an attitude that is so customer-unfriendly that you begin to wonder just what century the IT company’s central planners happen to be living in right now.

Last time we looked the online, connected, interactive, 21st century world was all about customers being at the centre of a two-way exchange with the ability to make their opinion felt and the pressure on the service provider to so manage the exchange as to create a favourable impression upon the customer.

Microsoft’s take on this is that if customers are so stupid as to not use its ‘fantastic’ Live Search portal then it has little choice but to bribe them. The latest article on the subject coming out of the Times Online website shows that Microsoft is prepared to open its coffers and use its marketplace stature to literary bribe online searchers with the offer of a possible cashback on purchases.

What Microsoft, once more and incredibly so, fails to get is that the online experience is all about convenience and ease of use. I want, at three o’clock in the morning to find the best place to access something (whether it is a service or information) and then act upon it. Microsoft’s proposal adds an extra layer of bureaucracy to this enterprise which will entail some filling in of forms (hopefully digital and not – gasp! Paper), some kind of confirmation of the accessing of the service or product provided by the site I found and then some rebate on the money I spent.

Having been on the receiving end of such offers in the Windows OS in the real world I am not holding my breath that it is going to be easy or take my need for ease of use seriously at all which then makes the whole point moot. I might consider using Live Search, looking for particular sites which I have first found through Google, if the rebate for a large ticket item such as a PC or a new LCD TV is large enough to justify the hassle but otherwise I find the very fact that Microsoft thinks so little of me as a person that it is trying to bribe me to use its online search service, insulting.

Without realising it of course, Microsoft, are also putting themselves in a spot here. Imagine finding an online retailer whose products I absolutely love, through Google, and then being unable to find the same retailer using Live Search (a scenario which, given Live Search’s indexing issues, is not that far-fetched). It would negate pretty much everything MS is trying to achieve.

I understand that Google, right now, have pretty much monopolised the online search business. I am not that happy about it either. I would really like to see real competition not just bribes to use a service. So how about MS using its bribing budget to make Live Search as intuitive to use and powerful as Google search, then we might have a real alternative to Google and MS will not need to throw its money about to pursue what I suspect is the path of least resistance, rather than choose a truly qualitative-driven path.

This last remark also highlights the difference between old-world, last-century thinking and an internet company. In the online world there is little space for second-rate services or products. Customers are just one click away from being lost to you forever. Google understands that. They roll out web-based services that they themselves would like to use. I get the feeling that Microsoft employees use Google search when they are at home, and it shows.