The other thing, the other mission for Microsoft, is to build a relationship directly with the consumer and proprietary audience.
For us, the challenge is that it's an investment. I think that's the biggest difference between Microsoft and where I worked at Ask.com, with the kind of investment we can make.
If we can grow our audience and continue to retain the audience, AdCenter is a great investment. Now, if we can't win the audience game, then AdCenter may not be a great investment. But it has a great potential to touch this $500 billion advertising market, which is three times as big as the software market.
When do you see a point in the battle with Google where you guys aren't really investing, to try and catch up to what they're doing?
Berkowitz: Well, I think there are some places we're investing to catch up, and I think there are other places like (Virtual Earth 3D) we're investing to be ahead. The challenge for Microsoft is we have to get the basics right. I don't consider that catch-up, I just believe it's what we have to do. Then we have to innovate through different ways, we have to realize that technology is the enabler and not the answer.
I think there are areas we're ahead. In instant messaging, we're way ahead of Google. In terms of search, we're behind Google, but we're catching up dramatically, and I think we'll catch up in places. But it's getting that basic flavor right. Once we get it right, then it becomes a battle of what does the consumer want, and how do we create a better consumer experience? Google has its challenges there, and we have our challenges in other places.
You mentioned that the technology is the enabler, not the solution. A lot of the initial Windows Live services are pretty geeky. Is that the strategy?
Berkowitz: No, that has to do, again, with what was the focus of the company. It's understanding where technology begins and where the consumer experience begins and where the technology ends. So sometimes I think we get ahead of ourselves in technology, and we think that the technology, which is cool to us, is actually what consumers want.
But it's hard, because you've got two sets of constituencies: You've got the technorati--the people who want to see the new, cool, innovative stuff--and then you've got the person who really wants to just kind of evolve their experience. And we have to balance that.
The company has leaned itself towards a lot of the kind of really whiz-bang cool stuff, but that's not what wins the day at the end of the day. We have to find a way to do a better job of thinking about the customer and what the customer wants.
And I think you'll see that, I think you'll start to see things from us. It's going to take me 12 to 18 months to get my hands on it from the product development side, but you're going to start to see us move to a much more consumer-friendly kind of evolution.
The Google purchase of You Tube--I'm kind of curious what you guys make of that.
Berkowitz: First of all, what that tells you is that audience is important. They didn't acquire it for technology, they acquired it for audience. But what they realized is that user-generated video is a platform, and that they need to integrate that platform into the Google experience. That's why we're launching Soapbox, because YouTube, as a destination, really is more of a gadget that you use as a certain piece of your experience, but it's not a total experience. So I think they bought it because they realized it's a way to step up audience, it's a way to monetize video in the long term, and it's the way to get that user-generated video. That brand and experience are just as important as technology.
Obviously, lots of people are interested in user-generated video; the big question is, why is it interesting for advertisers?
Berkowitz: I don't know how interesting it's going to be for advertisers. To me, it's interesting for audience, and I believe if you aggregate audience, you'll find different ways to get the advertisers.
Play video
» Blades for superior performance
There are currently no comments for this post.