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Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer and Robbie Bach delivered the keynote last night at the 2010 Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas and it was the usual mixture of self-congratulatory boosterism and product and technology demos. Here is my list of highlights:
Windows 7
After a report on how well Windows 7 is selling, there were the PC demos including a prototype Hewlett-Packard slate PC that the technical press was pining for.
It looks like a touch enabled netbook to me and while it may have a niche, I suspect I would be screaming for a keyboard (or at least a stylus) in under a minute of usage. Perhaps more interesting were the ultrathin Lenovo A300 laptop with a 21.5" screen and the Sony VAIO home entertainment notebook with a 24" screen. How big does a laptop have to get before it becomes a single element desktop?
Bing
HP is making Bing the default Web search engine and MSN the default home page on all their PCs in 42 countries.
Xbox
Ballmer put the usual lipstick on this pig and Robbie Bach appeared later to flog upcoming games (including another lucrative Halo version) and tout Project Natal, the motion sensing technology that will appear later this year to replace the standard controllers for some games.
Windows Mobile
Zzzzzz.
Mediaroom 2.0
Bach also announced Mediaroom 2.0, the latest version of Microsoft’s IPTV offering for service providers which now supports PCs and smartphoes as well as set top boxes and Xbox consoles for TV viewing.
Summary
Microsoft really did not have much of its own to show again this year. I am almost beginning to miss the goofy Bill Gates future technology skits.
Microsoft was touting a deal with personal computer giant Hewlett-Packard for Black Friday shopping this holiday weekend that offered shoppers 40% discounts if they went through Microsoft’s incentive shopping service, Live Search cashback. Unfortunately, Microsoft was not prepared for the load on their servers:
First, Microsoft’s Live Search Cashback site was down for a good part of the day, preventing many online shoppers from taking advantage of the Black Friday cashback promotions from HP and others. Now, some of the people who did get through to the site are reporting that they received a mere 3 percent cashback from their HP purchases, not the promised 40 percent.
The 3% instead of 40% is fixable with a lot of elbow grease from Microsoft and HP employees and yes, Web site overloads from holiday shopping frenzy aren’t uncommon, but this is certainly a PR black eye for Live Search. Even worse,it is extraneous to Live Search’s mission as a Web Search alternative to Google and Yahoo.
From a bean counter perspective, Microsoft likely is subsidizing Live Search cashback so the glitches may have actually saved money, but if the folks at HP wisely put a reimbursement clause in the contract it may get very expensive for Microsoft. As for HP, their online store just missed one of the biggest shopping days of the year so I am sure they are rather grumpy. Next year, I bet the "doorbuster specials" won’t be Live Search cashback exclusive.
Linda Buquet at the 5 Star Affiliate Programs Blog notices a part of the Microsoft Financial Analyst Day presentations which reveals that the MSN browser toolbar about to be installed on all Hewlett-Packard consumer PCs will try to entice Google searchers over to Microsoft’s own Live Search cashback deals. From Satya Nadella’s portion of Steve Ballmer’s presentation:
So the last thing I wanted to show you is one of the challenges, of course, we have, given our share position, is how do we really get more people to know about Live Search and get the taste for some of the value, like, in particular, the cashback value? So the place where we are innovating is in the toolbar. We have recently done a distribution deal for our toolbar with Hewlett-Packard. So this is the toolbar that Hewlett-Packard will carry with some customizations of their own. It’s the MSN toolbar.
And so let’s say I’m on Google and I type in Xbox. I can go ahead and search for Xbox, and automatically the toolbar detects that you’re searching for Xbox on Google and a Gleam view that there is a cashback on Live Search. And so I can go ahead and at this point click on that Gleam and it’ll take you to Live Search, or it’s supposed to take you to Live Search. Oh, it is on Live Search. See, I didn’t even notice the transfer. So it’s so seamless that now you’re on Live Search. You can get the cashback for a particular Xbox that you want to buy. So that’s just an experiment on how we get the word out, get more users trying Live Search, and getting the value of things like Live Search cashback.
Buquet’s beef is that affiliate marketers who are advertising on Google and always trying to get their sites to rank higher in the search results are going to be cut out of their commissions if searchers buy via Live Search cashback. My concern is that this seems like the most annoying sort of crapware bloat with privacy concerns to boot.
Admittedly, a “gleam” (which is a lit up marker on the toolbar) is probably the least offensive way to do this (compared to pop-ups, say), but it is yet one more piece of dancing baloney that slows down the browser. As for Microsoft getting a complete copy of your Google searching history (and what else?), that ought to be grist for the privacy advocates’ mills. Yet another thing to uninstall if you buy an HP machine, I guess, and to be wary of installing otherwise.
Microsoft announced today that starting in 2009 all Hewlett-Packard consumer Windows PCs distributed in the USA and Canada will be preloaded with Live Search as the default Web search engine in Internet Explorer and with a custom Live Search enabled toolbar featuring their Silverlight technology. HP had previously been signed up with Yahoo.
Danny Sullivan has a nice table of PC OEMs, their US market share, and the search engine they have signed up with and adding HP clearly is a leg up for Microsoft since HP is a strong number 2 (24%) to Dell (31%) who signed with Google in 2006. Before this HP deal, Microsoft only had Lenovo whose US share was minimal.
The question, of course, is how many users actually stick with the OEM presets for IE or change them or switch to Firefox (which defaults to Google). All of the search engines track the sourcing from toolbars and preloads (use one of them for a search query and check the parameters on the URL) so they have a good idea on traffic and ROI at least after one of these deals is started, but Microsoft undoubtedly has more than ROI on their mind.
First Microsoft has to grow beyond their single digit Web search share if their advertising aspirations are to be realized and this is one way of doing that. Second, a Silverlight toolbar means a Silverlight preload which Microsoft had yet to ante up for with the OEMs and that’s critical if they expect to get their Adobe Flash killer off the ground. There’s been no insight into what sort of bidding went on for the HP eyeballs, but there are lots of reasons why Microsoft would not want to be outbid.
