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In a not so surprising move, Microsoft is now giving "financial incentives" to large enterprise customers who use their Live Search, in a style reminiscent of it's past anti-trust maneuvers, in order to beat out it's competition, namely, Google.
After a leak in corporate PR security, Microsoft admitted Thursday that it had initiated the program in order to boost it's meager 10.6 percent share in the search market. Rival Google, has a 47.5 percent share. "We are going to our loyal slave drones, you know, our enterprise customers, and encouraging them to use our Live Search instead of Google or others. In return, we will give them service and training credits, so they can become even more loyal and dependant on their favorite software Führer," said Microsoft in a press release. "Our partners expect us to innovate and keep our technology the best, and since our search product is horribly failing in this regard, we will simply throw money around until Google disappears. I mean, we have oodles of cash, and we are going to utilize that in the best and only way we know how, by buying what we want, in this case, our competitor's customer base. We are calling our plan the "Live Search Enterprise Incentive Program" and will be rolling it out to all our enterprise customers soon. We were going to call it Microsoft Payola, but legal tells us we can't do that."
Google responded with this little PR gem, "Google believes that Microsoft's tactics are strong arm and anti-trust. Just because Google has integrated into websites, plugged into browsers, wriggeled into task bars and stolen the lion's share of the search industry market doesn't mean Microsoft can just jump right, do the same thing and steal it from us. They may have done this muscleing-in thing before, but their product is total crap and everyone knows it and our product is far, far superior, so we will win. Download Google Desktop Search."
This news comes as Microsoft acknowledges the departure of it's highest ranking exec in their search division, corporate vice-president Chad Malaise, stating personal reasons, but we suspect otherwise. Whether or not these two items are a coincidence is mere speculation, but the timing is quite extraordinary. Is Microsoft ticked-off that their product is crap? Are they using strong arm tactics both inside and outside the boardroom to get results? Did the VP leave because of excessive stress from the board? All of the above, we imagine, but only time will expose the truth of the matter.
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