May 11, 2007 | Friday

What’s important to Bill Gates?

By Jackie Danicki - Blogger  in News |Online Sales |PPC |Search Engines |Google |Yahoo |Microsoft |Search Technology

If you were Bill Gates, standing at the beginning of your last year of full-time employment with Microsoft, what do you think your main area of concentration would be in those final, precious days? Perfecting internet security, obliterating spam, delivering whiz-bang-flash ‘content’? No, no, and no.

At MSN’s eighth annual Strategic Account Summit in Redmond this week, Gates announced that his focus will be directed primarily at search and online buying and selling. It seems the man who, well into adulthood, reportedly needed his mother to remind him to wash his hair does not need much reminding that there is a massive amount of revenue to be made in search.

Adam Sohn, Microsoft’s director of global sales and marketing PR, also detailed exactly what Microsoft is going to be up to with search:

A key focus of Microsoft’s search initiative is to develop what Sohn called “convenience” search, or search provided as one aspect of other services such as instant messaging. Sohn said that convenience search contrasts with “destination” search, or the static search-page model made prominent by Google. Google, Sohn commented, is “a one-trick pony, but it’s a nice trick.”

One competitor that also actively deploys convenience search, he said, is Yahoo, “because they have such big network” of services.

Ah yes, that takes us back to those Microsoft/Yahoo M & A rumours from one week ago. (Note how a few days in online time really can feel like weeks.) The trail on those went cold after it was reported that yes, there had been merger talk, but it ended some time ago. (If they’re talking online time, “some time ago” might well mean two weeks ago, not one.) Still, never say never when it comes to this lot. As long as Google is still the competitor they all dream of giving a bloody nose, anything is possible. 

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