I was reading Twitter today and was surprised to read that Microsoft is going to spend about 80 Million dollars on ad campaigns to support it's new search system Bing.
With this investment Microsoft hopes to be able to finally keep up with Yahoo and Google in the Search Engine business.

Over time Microsoft has tried a couple of techniques to attract users to it's products, including money rewards with their Live Search Cashback.

According to an AdAge Magazine report 65% of Live Search are happy with Microsoft's live search. Meanwhile Microsoft believes that it can improve as 25% of clicks are to return to the previous page and 42% of searches need to improve results.

If we look at internet search use today, althouh microsoft live search needs redifinements the best they can get it to be the number 2 search engine as Google became an organic part of our internet habits and as for Yahoo, in Europe their influence is not as big as in the EUA but has some interesting tools that users find very usefull and that actually compete with Google, something that has been missing on Live Search since it started.

In the end I don't see how Microsoft's investment of 80M will help them to get better results. It might get some curiosity traffic but in the end I believe the effect will not be as they hope.
I think microsoft would  be better off using the 80M criating another inovation with the concern to make it extremly usefull and in an open format.

I admit to like microsoft and several of their products but making products that make users live harder, expeceally when it comes to sharing on different systems is not the right path to take.

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