Ballmer Criticized by Motley Fool
January 1, 2009
Tim Beyers, writing in The Motley Fool here, inked an open letter to Steve Ballmer. The idea of an open letter is that the recipient does not respond to private letters. So, the author writes a personal letter and makes it available to the public. I like open letters; it is similar to the thrill of finding a sheet of writing in a library book. Those documents are exciting and somewhat mysterious. “An Open Letter to Steve Ballmer” was not too exciting or mysterious. The message is one that is widely discussed; namely, “Google is the elephant in your Redmond, Wash. boardroom.” For years–a decade to be precise–Google has been waving the Web search flag and spraying advertising at anyone who would fall for the pitch. Google for years avoided any hint of competing with Microsoft. But after a decade, the mask is off. Google is the new Microsoft. Microsoft is now the IBM that was bedeviled by the “old” Microsoft. IBM has morphed into a weird consulting and services outfit, a path that Microsoft may be forced to follow. The shadow of Googzilla has been replaced by the dude himself.
Mr. Beyers’ made this point:
Drastic measures are all that’s left. You have to do something Google hasn’t tried but everyone wants. You’ve got to master social search, and then embed it with every platform you own.
Yep, I agree. Leapfrog is the game that must be played. Microsoft has a penchant for buying abandoned animals. My wife and I rescued a boxer. She loves us and is more grateful than my former show dog. He’s entitled in his doggy mind. Tess is thrilled not be kicked and ignored. She gets better health care than most people. But Tess is a lot of work and it is 100 percent impossible to turn her into a show dog. Microsoft’s acquisition of Fast Search & Transfer is a corollary. Powerset is another stray. Yahoo, yet another lost dog it is. None of these creatures can do battle with the Google in my opinion and win.
The problem is Googzilla and that greedy creature requires action built on reaction and stray technologies.
I don’t agree with Mr. Beyers that social search is one way to hip hop over Google. Social search is useful, but it will not do the job on the GOOG. Think 90 pound weakling against the Incredible Hulk. Life does not imitate anime.
Will Mr. Ballmer read and heed Mr. Beyers’ open letter. Nope. Will the Google continue to disrupt Microsoft’s business model. Yep. Is there a company able to stop the GOOG in 2009? Nope.
Stephen Arnold, January 1, 2009
Comments
3 Responses to “Ballmer Criticized by Motley Fool”
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
[...] Ballmer Criticized by Motley Fool [...]
Steve,
Your assertion that MS has and will continue to fail in its efforts to displace Google seems accurate. However, you swing too far to the conclusion that Google is unstoppable in 2009.
Don’t be blinded by Google.com’s sexy moniker, advertising-based financials and page-ranking algorithm. If you’ve bothered to talk to any Google GSA enterprise search customers over the last 2-3 years, you;ll hear the same story repeated over and over again…
- Painful self-service support options
- GSA is unable to be restored from backup
- GSA’s connector story is ridiculous (requires discrete stand-alone Tomcat instances on separate HW for each connector)
Most large enterprise GSA customers are NOT happy with the solution they knee-jerk bought 2-3 years ago to replace Verity or Autonomy and they are routinely replacing Google GSA with better next gen ES solutions on the market from all your favorite pet vendors in this market.
So please – enough with the Google worship. Google is, after all, a dysfunctional band of pompous SAT-obsessed brats in bainstorming sessions bickering over private pet projects that never lead to any real search breakthroughs in production. But they’ve got a great cafeteria and foosball setup.
Notzo Fast,
I suggest you catalog some of the weaknesses of the competitors’ search solutions. Should we start with Fast ESP? Autonomy? Endeca? One of the 300 others? The GOOG has more than 25,000 licensees and more customers trying to get the entitled ones to return phone calls, provide more information, take money. To my knowledge, this suggests a strong wind behind the GOOG and tough sailing for those wanting to sink Googzilla’s ship.
Stephen Arnold, January 6, 2009