
Bungled branding of the new Windows Live Internet services has hurt Microsoft and could
affect its chance to play catch-up with Google, analysts said on Friday. On Thursday, Microsoft lowered its sales forecast for its Internet services business for the full year from 11 percent to between 3 percent and 8 percent. It also acknowledged that its search market share has dropped. Windows Live Search saw its searches drop nearly 10 percent from a year ago, while Google's rose more than 22 percent, according to figures released this week from Nielsen/NetRatings. Google has 50.8 percent market share, followed by Yahoo at 23.6 percent and Microsoft with only 8.4 percent.
Member since:
2005-12-13
I think the point here is that who cares what the UI of a search service is if it cant find what you are looking for? MSN/Windows Live is far behind for a reason and it isn't branding.
There seems to be a level of quality in Google services (and even Yahoo to some degree) that is not found in the MSN services.
I still can't get over how much better Google Desktop is at searching and organizing my Outlook folders than any feature or tool within MS Office.