April 11, 2007 | Wednesday

Microsoft tweaking to win

By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in Marketing |News |PPC |Search Engines |Microsoft |Search Technology |SEO

Microsoft has announced that it will be tweaking its AdCenter search offering in order to align more closely with the approach of its rivals, Google and Yahoo. Brian Boland, group marketing director for Microsoft AdCenter, said that landing page quality will factor more prominently in the search result rankings criteria, and that the company is eager for their users to spend less time on finding more relevant results.

At the same time, Steve Berkowitz, senior VP of Microsoft’s Online Services Group, said that Microsoft has admitted it hasn’t done enough to integrate its search offering into its portfolio of products, and that it isn’t seen as a cool company like its rivals. Berkowitz thinks that - in NMA‘s words - the company needs to be “marketing [themselves] harder”:

We have so much innovation and so much creativity and talent [at Microsoft], yet we as a company haven’t done a very good job at making ourselves cool.

Doing cool, innovative stuff will make people perceive you as cool and innovative. That’s not marketing, that’s providing tangible value to customers, which is what all business should be about. Microsoft certainly has the brain power and the budget it needs to produce the goods, so here’s hoping that Berkowitz’s statement will spur the company to throw the shackles off and start wowing us all with their capabilities and products. With Google constantly embroiled in the “Friend or foe?” debate - and they are largely seen as a company of which to be extremely wary - the prize is Microsoft’s for the taking.