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Live Search Books was announced in October 2005 as MSN Book Search with considerable hoopla, plans to digitize the British Library, and verbal fisticuffs with Google over copyright and Google Book Search, but it has all come to nought as Microsoft’s Satya Nadella announced today:
Today we informed our partners that we are ending the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and that both sites will be taken down next week. Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes.
This also means that we are winding down our digitization initiatives, including our library scanning and our in-copyright book programs. We recognize that this decision comes as disappointing news to our partners, the publishing and academic communities, and Live Search users.
…
With Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, we digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries.
The rest of Nadella’s comments can be summarized as "Microsoft couldn’t figure out how to make any money on this stuff." I remarked when MSN Book Search was announced that the business model was rather vague and apparently altruism was not a sufficient rationale.
Microsoft has given up on the third party translator route to support the Open Document Format (ODF) for office documents that is so beloved by governments and open standards advocates. Office 2007 SP2 scheduled for 1H2009 is now slated to have built-in support for ODF:
The 2007 Microsoft Office system already provides support for 20 different document formats within Microsoft Office Word, Office Excel and Office PowerPoint. With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) scheduled for the first half of 2009, the list will grow to include support for XML Paper Specification (XPS), Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1.
When using SP2, customers will be able to open, edit and save documents using ODF and save documents into the XPS and PDF fixed formats from directly within the application without having to install any other code. It will also allow customers to set ODF as the default file format for Office 2007. To also provide ODF support for users of earlier versions of Microsoft Office (Office XP and Office 2003), Microsoft will continue to collaborate with the open source community in the ongoing development of the Open XML-ODF translator project on SourceForge.net.
In addition, Microsoft has defined a road map for its implementation of the newly ratified International Standard ISO/IEC 29500 (Office Open XML). IS29500, which was approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in March, is already substantially supported in Office 2007, and the company plans to update that support in the next major version release of the Microsoft Office system, code-named “Office 14.”
Open Office XML (OOXML) which was approved as an ISO standard in April, is almost but not quite the native document format of Office 2007, so some touch-up is required.
Back in 2005, Bill Gates suggested that Microsoft might provide financial rewards to attract search users, but the devil is, as always, in the details. You can’t pay for raw numbers of searches, because the scammers would be all over it and the Live Search Club games of last summer had a similar problem. Now according to the Seattle PI’s Todd Bishop, Microsoft is set to try again with the announcement of an incentivized shopping promotion called Live Search cashback which only pays if you buy products from selected retailers. The somewhat oldtimey slogan is ‘Microsoft Live Search cashback is “The Search That Pays You Back”.’
The basic idea is that you “search for cashback deals at Live Search cashback” and if you buy, Microsoft will put an incentive payment of some percentage of the purchase price into your “cashback account” which you can withdraw in cash. What keeps it from being merely an incentive shopping site is that if you perform a regular search at Live Search, available cashback deals will be flagged with a little gold coin/dollar sign icon.
Microsoft has apparently signed up a number of major retailers and is presumably making the incentive payment out of a sales commission paid by them. The incentivized shopping model is hardly new, but what is new is that it is being associated with a legitimate search engine. While I hope participation in the program doesn’t affect the rankings of search results, the suspicion always is that by mixing search results and what are effectively paid ads, the search engine is stacking the deck. More may be known when the formal announcement is made later today.
Update: The speculation is that this is based on the technology Microsoft received last year when they acquired the Jellyfish comparison shopping site which had promised to “SHARE at least half of every $1 we earn when you shop and buy products using Jellyfish.com.” Also per the FAQ, you have to be a US resident to participate.
Update: The formal announcement doesn’t add much to the above. Some stats:
The complete Live Search cashback product portfolio includes more than 10 million product offers from more than 700 merchants, including more than 13 of the top 40 U.S. retailers.
Microsoft also announced Live Search Farecast for finding travel deals. It uses the technology acquired with Farecast in April.
I always like stories about the advertising business. The characters are strange, their ways are weird, and if you didn’t occasionally encounter the work product, you might think they were merely comedies of manners. Anyway, another entry in the genre is Danielle Sacks’ Fast Company article, Can Alex Bogusky help Microsoft Beat Apple? which lightly recounts the development of an upcoming ad campaign for Microsoft by "bad boy" ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky.
It isn’t spelled out explicitly in the article, but Microsoft has many advertising campaigns for its many products and the one in question is a $300 million exercise in consumer product branding. That seems to cover Zune, Xbox, Windows Live, and even Vista, but we won’t know until about July when the campaign is rumored to start. It is the nature of the beast that most advertising campaigns fall flat, but it will be interesting to see what vaunted purveyors of corporate "cool" like Crispin Porter + Bogusky can come up with. They certainly can’t do worse than what has passed for Zune advertising.
