Microsoft’s Steve Keynotes New York SES

April 11, 2007
by Latitude

I am over at SES New York this week and this morning I attended the Keynote where Danny Sullivan interviewed Steve Berkowitz the ‘Windows Live Chief’.

It was a 45 minute session where Steve played his cards close to his chest on a lot of the things Danny fired at him. I highlight of the session was when Danny asked Steve about the recent Media on the concept of Microsoft potentially buying Yahoo. This question was broke up brilliantly by the intervention of Ms Dewey (the actual one!) from there interactive engine at http://www.msdewey.com/ she broke up the question and actually set Danny and Steve straight on a few things in life before exiting stage right, so no further news on that speculation!

Steve spoke about distribution and that Microsoft are working hard on where to achieve this from. It could be acquisition, but his main focus I felt was when he used the line “It will be about where we take search and the way we innovate to get it there and integrate it to properties such as Portals, Messenger Dialogue and all the stuff in Microsoft Labs..that will blow your mind”

He was careful to stress that Microsoft has not been in search long but it has been in business and the media/technology sector for a long time so has a lot of weight to distribute as the strategy develops.

Danny asked Steve that is must be great to control and OS such as Explorer, but Steve was of a different opinion which I tend to agree with. He said “there is no benefit, as people we will always replace to our preference of search engine or toolbar after we purchase the PC…the customer is the final decision maker”

I think this is a great way to position it and it shows the battle is not just in the UK for Microsoft to increase the search share it has. He always stressed “it is how the products integrate for them, together it is more than search”

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