mikedee - 5:45 pm on May 20, 2008 (gmt 0)

I found this interesting quote from 2004 where Ballmer is outlining their future in search... How times change...

Search obviously is an important area. It's an area where we had for a long time essentially built a search strategy based upon components that were to some large degree outsourced. It’s probably the thing that I feel worst about over the last several years -- us not making the R&D investment ourselves up front, but rather outsourcing. It’s funny, people sometimes say Microsoft wants to do it all. This is a case where we actually didn’t do it all. Shoot, I wish we had done it all. ... There's no magic in a sense about search. I just looked at the cover of this most recent Newsweek with the picture of the Google guys and you would think there was some magic looking at the cover of Newsweek, but there's no magic here. ... With the kind of stuff we have in this company – hardcore software developers – we’ll be able to do very, very, very, very well, and we are committed to doing very, very, very well. I think you’ll see a lot of really good competition in the search area.

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