It’s a snow day here in Seattle, which means I and everyone else without four wheel drive is home waiting for the ice to melt off the roads. Thus, I’m able to respond to some of the public comments out there on my recent post about search.

First, let me cut to the chase… the three questions that everyone asks me about search when they find out I’m from Microsoft are:

1. Will Microsoft beat Google?
2. How will Microsoft beat Google?
3. When will Microsoft beat Google?

Let me answer them: Maybe. By building products customers prefer over Google. Not soon.

Maybe? Maybe? What’s this, why on earth is some Microsoft employee saying maybe? What, is his 2007 New Year’s Resolution to send his resume to Google or Yahoo or some other startup? Why is this guy on the team? Fire him now!

Yeah, Microsoft might beat Google. And Google might beat Microsoft. There aren’t many that have beaten Microsoft, but there are a couple. Intuit, for example. So what am I doing here? Well, there’s nothing as boring as a fight when the outcome is certain. If I wanted to work somewhere that had 90% share and whose competition was the inertia to upgrade, well, I’d work for the Windows or Office teams. If I wanted to work somewhere that had no chance of cracking 25% let alone winning, and whose only real happy outcome it to be acquired for the traffic, I’d work at Ask (sorry guys). No, I want to be where the action is — the big leagues with everyone giving it their all. I’m confident we can win, but there’s nothing like going up against someone who is equally confident they can win as well. I don’t want to work somewhere where it’s clear that I’ll be on the winning side as long as I punch in every day. I want to be somewhere where it’s not clear that I’ll be on the winning side unless I give it my all. So yeah… it’s definitely a maybe, and I wouldn’t want it to be any other way.

I won’t speak on When besides the obvious. Google is pressing ahead, and they’ve got a big lead. So unless they do something monumentally stupid, which I doubt, it’ll be a long, tough challenge to catch and beat them. I don’t think that means it’s a 20 year thing, but I wouldn’t be shocked if it were 5 years. Hopefully we can get it done sooner, but again, they’re good.

As for How… here’s an interesting quote from Danny’s comment on my comment on his post (echo echo echo):

Microsoft has changed four or five times in radical ways over the past two years, including an entire brand change. The last service to change so much like this was AltaVista, which I joked could give Madonna a run for her money in the image change department. None of those changes helped AltaVista. For Microsoft, I think it would actually benefit from really locking down the overall look-and-feel for an extended period. The good news is, I suspect that’s actually going to be the case. New features seem likely to be added, but yet another redesign doesn’t seem in the works.

I’m not sure how he’s counting, but essentially, I see two changes:

1. Jan 31, 2005: We re-launched MSN Search with our own engine. This was mostly an under-the-hood change.
2. Sep 11, 2006: We launched Live.com. This was mostly a cosmetic change; the underlying engine was the same (as far as Web search results go).

When I joined the team in Feb of 2004, my prediction then was that we’d keep the MSN brand as long as our engine was noticably worse than our competition. As soon as it was competitive, we’d find that the effort to transform the MSN brand into one that resonated high quality search would be overly challenging, and we’d transform into something else. That has essentially played out - although to be fair, the decisions made may be purely coincidental with my prediction — I’m not that high up the corporate chain.
Live.com is the big bet, as is plainly obvious to everyone. There will be some brand unification and hopefully some renaming to simpler things (I’m still hoping for Live Maps instead of the ungainly Windows Live Local myself, but that’s just me), and lots of angst over making things consistent across the entire Live.com world versus making an individual property optimal. But overall, you’ll start to see a lot of stuff coming from Live.

Of course, the key question is, will it be better than the cool stuff coming from Google? Well… maybe.

Edited to remove overly strong and unfairly negative language regarding the MSN brand.