I watched on techcrunch a couple of weeks ago the future of search by Google. It impressives me, not only because they will team up human rating with pagerank but also because it will create new sources of traffic creation for all of us (your name is visible on each comment & rating made). Google was already taken something around 75% of our attention, it will become with this 99%.
It made me realize that Microsoft will never catchup on web search. They are too far behind, even buying Yahoo won’t solve the problem.
Having said that, Mr Balmer should look at emerging countries and learn from their “jump to the next generation” attitude.
When you start traveling there, you realize they’ve chosen not to catch up but to invest into the next generation infrastructure and it’s a winning strategy: Estonia (called E-stonia), Macedonia (wimax covered), Africa (mobile applications stronger than web ones), UAE (150% mobile penetration rate)…
That’s why should focus on the next big thing: Mobile.
Mobile is the big thread for Google (my previous post on this here).
Why? because with mobile will come new usage patterns. Today, everything start with google but tomorrow nobody knows what will be the entry point on mobile internet. Google already working on it with Android and their strong presence in the iphone.
Of course, it’s easy to say not easy to do, but with Microsoft cash-flow, it should be doable.
My humble opinion
