The blogs have heavily commented the recent acquisition of aQuantive by Microsoft, as part of a move in strategic businesses. They have been put back in perspective of the great number of acquisitions of advertising companies over the past 8 weeks. All of it seems to be based on future earnings in online advertsiing.
All this makes me think of the other war…The company which controls the “search” environment is likely to take over the web…Until the next killer app comes around. What will it be? What happens after you’ve found what you searched for ? How do you stick to it and enrich it?
Nielsen/NetRatings released on May 21st that Microsoft’s search business lost market share in April, from 10,1% in March to 9%. In the same research, Google is increasing its lead and represents 55.2% of web searches, up from 53.7% in March. Yahoo! remains stable : +0.1% with a 21.9% market share. I was meeting last week with a top R&D executive from Microsoft who conceded easily that their search engine was not nearly as performing as Google (which he uses by the way).