Forum Moderators: mack
If it gets dominance, Microsoft will stop development (witness PowerPoint, IE), and use its leverage to squash competitors in any field they touch. Even now, while trying to wear the white hat, they still serve up (miserable) Encarta pages at the top of educational searches.
Want the best argument: Would you post this message, or would you be afraid someone at Microsoft would read it and penalize your sites?
Don't be afraid. Survive and prosper- under any circumstance.
If it gets dominance, Microsoft will...
Microsoft hasn't dominated anything for six or eight years now. It's ok to come out of the bomb shelter. Flowers still grow from the garden. And there are chocolates in the boxes waiting for you.
...use its leverage to squash competitors in any field they touch.
That is called business. Google does it. We do it. Governments around the world do it. Religions do it. Male animals do it to other male animals.
Said with affection for the membership, but I find these kinds of fearful arguments against MS to be very repetitive and boring at best, and melodramatic and misguided at worst.
[edited by: martinibuster at 6:48 pm (utc) on July 1, 2004]
Surviving and prospering in non-democratic circumstances, while possible, is generally fraught with a lot of immoral (and usually depressing) activity.
Check your server logs some day. Work in an office.
"That is called business. Google does it. We do it. Governments around the world do it. Religions do it. Male animals do it to other male animals."
Business will do what they can do. Because Google is dependent on its search quality, it has a powerful incentive to keep it up. And because Google doesn't sell other things, they don't favor their products in their searches. These restrictions do not apply to Microsoft.
Microsoft has vastly greater leverage in other ways. What do you get from Google? A web page and a toolbar, at best. Microsoft has more. The vast majority of site visitors are coming on a Microsoft browser, with a Microsoft OS. Many sites are served by Microsoft server software, and are built with Microsoft markup tools. Even if they don't directly control something, they have enormous (and generally bad) influence. This post, like all others, is wrapped in a font tag, with just one font listed, that ugly rip-off Arial!
If they can improve their results enough, Microsoft will gain some share. But fair competition is not their usual practice. After all, if MSN Search were judged by quality alone, it would receive much less traffic. Instead, they get a lot of default traffic--my elderly father, for example, never changed his default page, and doesn't know there are other ways to search. This small advantage will grow much larger, as search-integration is central to Microsoft's next OS, Longhorn. One can bet it will be a lot easier to search with MSN search than Google.
Example: As reported by the NYT today, MSN is dropping paid search inclusion. For now. They are likely to add it back when they can.
This post, like all others, is wrapped in a font tag, with just one font listed, that ugly rip-off Arial!
Actually, it is Verdana, which suits the web rather well. Arial is also used on this page but it is narrower.
Said with affection for the membership, but I find these kinds of fearful arguments against MS to be very repetitive and boring at best, and melodramatic and misguided at worst.
Microsoft has a strong history of coming from behind to dominate an industry.
Think Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player (although being challenged by iTunes), the whole "internet", the enterprise SQL market, enterprise messaging (Exchange).
I am the first to admit I am a Microsoft supporter - I used to work for the Australian office as an intern. But I do not think that MS will dominate the search industry like it has other segements of the IT market. Whilst I think it will grab a line ball share, it does have the other big two out there (Google and Yahoo!) and various other country / industry specific niche players to balance it out.
I read a great article a while ago (its location currently escapes me) which talked about Microsoft coming into a market (the search space) and evening out the playing field by removing some of Google's power.
Normally it is the other way round!
Warren
On the new beta site of Microsoft Search we are also not listed and I guess banned too. (They did however crawled around 2 million pages over the past 3 months)
Any way it is not the end of the world as Mr. Gates never liked our website and we never liked his software.
If not for them, MS would rub it's hands in glee at the thought of another "i came, i saw, i compressed".
This is completely the kinda challenge which gets bill and steve want to wake up early and come to work.
And given the zillions of dollars and total market influence they have, there would be nothing except the
above to keep them from winning.
To think otherwise is to completely not learn from the endless list of corporate corpses strewn about in microsoft's path .. borland .. lotus .. word perfect .. netscape ..
