Microsoft News Tracker

OK, it’s in Australia where the Zune isn’t available, but it still seems a little awkward to Use Microsoft to Win Apple Products:

Microsoft is dangling prizes made by arch-nemesis Apple to entice Australian web surfers to give its online search products a second chance.

Through its local joint venture with the Nine Network, ninemsn, Microsoft recently completed a full revamp of Live Search to improve results and integrate video, images, news and maps into search queries.

But in what is perhaps a sign of desperation given Google’s growing market share dominance, ninemsn is running a new Live Search promotion - Secret Search - offering surfers the chance to win prizes including the iPod Nano, Shuffle and Touch just for conducting searches.

Maybe Microsoft ought to try that in the USA too? No wacky Live Search Club games, no complicated Live Search cashback from retail purchases, just random prizes of good quality for searchers. Hit the rest of the article for an update on Live Search in Australia where Microsoft is ahead of Yahoo.

Microsoft’s Albany consumer software subscription service is now ready for prime time as Microsoft Equipt:

Microsoft Equipt offers consumers Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, giving them the latest versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote for their personal and school projects; Windows Live OneCare, the all-in-one security and PC management service; Windows Live tools, such as Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Photo Gallery so they can connect and share with people they care about most; and Office Live Workspace, a new service from Microsoft that makes it easy to save documents to a dedicated online Workspace and share them with friends and classmates. Anytime a new version of Office or Windows Live OneCare is released, Microsoft Equipt customers will get the version upgrades as part of their subscriptions.

Microsoft Equipt is $69.99 (U.S.) estimated retail price for a one-year renewable subscription. Each subscription will be good for three home PCs, making Microsoft Equipt ideal for families and individuals with one or several computers.

Microsoft Equipt will be sold in nearly 700 Circuit City stores in the U.S. starting mid-July 2008.

Ignoring the "Live" freebies, a visit to Amazon reveals that you can buy a OneCare subscription (3 licenses) for $21.95 per year leaving $48.04 annually to amortize the $111.49 that Amazon charges for Home and Student 2007 (3 licenses). That works out to a payoff of  2.3 years for buying the software upfront instead of getting an Equipt subscription and you will be able to use it forever. Of course, you won’t get the version upgrades with an upfront purchase, but how many consumers really care about that and if new versions only come every 4-5 years it’s a wash. On the face of it, Equipt isn’t a real consumer savings standout.

I would also observe that the marketing plan apparently isn’t complete since Circuit City could hardly be the exclusive retail source. It will also be interesting see if Microsoft can get Equipt preloaded by OEM’s on new PCs some of which currently ship with Home and Student trial offers. All it really takes is money to get that done.

All in all, while there may be a pony for Microsoft in a consumer software subscription service, Equipt as announced hardly seems to be it.

As had been rumored last week, Microsoft has acquired Powerset, a semantic search and natural language processing startup based in San Francisco for an undisclosed sum said by sources to be in the neighborhood of US$100 million. Microsoft SVP Satya Nadella explains the rationale:

Powerset will join our core Search Relevance team, remaining intact in San Francisco. Powerset brings with it natural language technology that nicely complements other natural language processing technologies we have in Microsoft Research.

More importantly, Powerset brings to Live Search a set of talented engineers and computational linguists in downtown San Francisco. This is a great team with a wide range of experience from other search engines and research organizations like PARC (formerly Xerox PARC).

We’re buying Powerset first and foremost because we’re impressed with the people there. Powerset CTO and cofounder Barney Pell is a visionary and incredible evangelist. When he introduced our senior engineers to some of the most senior people at Powerset — Search engineers and computational linguists like Tim Converse, Chad Walters, Scott Prevost, Lorenzo Thione, and Ron Kaplan — we came away impressed by their smarts, their experience, their passion for search, and a shared vision.

That shared vision is to take Search to the next level by adding understanding of the intent and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages.

There’s more on the technology there and on Powerset’s web site (including this demo video), but the big picture is to offer a better search to users than Google’s in order to whittle away at their share. I would have to observe that Powerset certainly isn’t the first or only company to try to apply semantic concepts or natural language processing to Web search - just Ask Jeeves.

Just like their Live Search Club , Microsoft’s Live Search cashback incentive program has drawn some "entrepreneurs":

That’s right, $630 in cash can be yours for $714. But if you access the page through a Live Search ad link that returns 35 per cent of the purchase price, you can make up the difference. And then some. So you make a profit, and so does the seller. At the expense of Microsoft and eBay.

Hit the link for further details as it is not clear that Microsoft is actually offering 35% anymore, but this was as inevitable as death and taxes.

Windows Live Expo, Microsoft’s Craigslist competitor that was supposed to provide online classified ads with a social networking twist and which was launched in the USA in July 2006 is now being closed down by Microsoft. According to a popup on the Expo site:

Windows Live Expo will discontinue service on 31 July 2008. In preparation, the following features are no longer available:

• Create a new account.
• Post a new listing.
• Extend a listing.
• Upgrade a listing to a premium listing.

All current listings will remain on expo.live.com until they expire.

It looks like Microsoft is conducting a little late Spring cleaning on Windows Live and tossing out some of the less successful efforts. First it was Live Search Books and Live Search Academic and now Live Expo. If Windows Live actually had a guiding philosophy it seemed to be a "complete" Web experience for the end user, but many of the offerings seemed to have little business justification or merely replicated existing services from other vendors as exemplified by the services already cut. It will be interesting to see how far Microsoft takes this housecleaning.