I haven’t been very consistent in blogging, especially about search, largely as it’s been rather tedious. I left the group over a year ago, and for the most part the search offering is pretty much the same as when I left. The market share has eroded. And while there is wild rumors of a plan for a rebranding… well… we’ll see.

I’ve also been very frustrated with Microsoft. I admit, I’m a fan, and Microsoft’s recent actions have left me feeling… well, let’s just say the peanut gallery is unimpressed.

No, it’s worse than that. The peanut gallery is disheartened, and disappointed.

In a recession, there are a number of companies that flail - not just the AIGs and WaMus of the world, but small companies struggling to make a profit. There are lots of companies that hunker down to make it through the lean times. There are a decent number of companies that do well - I work at one. Turns out that discounters, and Amazon.com is one, tend to do fairly well in tough times.

Then, there are a few special companies out there that can actually change things, and be the leaders of a new way of doing things.

Sony comes to mind. Sony is the company that, almost single-handedly, turned “Made in Japan” as a stamp of poor quality trash into a stamp of excellence, completely transforming an entire country’s production after it had been devastated by war.

I would have thought Microsoft could be that company during this recession.

When Balmer announced Microsoft would be laying off 1400 people, out of 90,000, that was about as weak a statement as I’ve seen. Citing that Microsoft wasn’t immune to the global downturn, they laid off 1400, told their employees that 3600 others would also be gone, and that it was time for extreme belt-tightening. All because they only made $2 billion in profit that quarter.

What I had expected was that Microsoft would just say, “Yup, profits are down, but we’re still making $2 billion, so we’re going to invest and come out of this just fine once the economy heats back up.” That had been the SOP for other downturns; if there were layoffs, it was the musical chairs type. Divisions would be re-orged out of existence, and people in them would have 3-6 months to find a new job or go away. Unbeknownst to them but knownst to all the hiring managers, good people were on a “save this person” list, and bad people… weren’t. So things got sorted out pretty quickly.

What I had hoped for was that Microsoft would be that Balmer would come out fighting. Not only would Microsoft be investing its massive earnings now, gearing itself up for when the economy heated up, but Microsoft would be investing heavily. Because of Microsoft’s diverse, and somewhat inelastic, revenue streams, Microsoft could do this. Microsoft was not going to be just another company hunkering down, Microsoft was going to invest for the future. And when that future came, Microsoft would be in a prime position to take advantage of the situation.

At least, that’s what I had hoped for. Ah well.

Well, that didn’t last long…. Jan has decided to go work for Qi over at Microsoft. Win some, lose some.

Well, looks like Microsoft is readying it’s latest search update. The internal site is Kumo (as in www.kumo.com), but the latest speculation is that Microsoft isn’t going to go with that branding. Whatever. Ina Fried over at CNet even picked up a screenshot, which I’ll copy here:

A couple of things come to mind. First, tabs are now on the side, and there are lots of links to sections on the page. Taylor Swift web pages, songs, lyrics, biography, music, albums, videos, etc. Then there are related searches, and then a very interesting section: “your history.” So, looks like they’re finally going to start to show you your previous searches and possibly let you do something with them! It’s about time some of that work started to see the light of day!

Another thing to notice… after every URL, there’s a “mark as spam” link… which I’m sure all the SEOs are talking about now, as this will allow them to mark their competition as spam in very entertaining ways. We’ll see how that goes.

Now, what really struck me about this look is that I’ve seen it before. In Korea. This is essentially the Naver look-and-feel:

Naver is the #1 search engine and portal in Korea, and everyone else, esp. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, aren’t even on the radar there. There are a few reasons for this, but the #1 reason is that Naver established an Answers section early (prior to their search engine if I recall), and thus they have a large knowledge base of useful answers. Yahoo Answers and Microsoft Q&A are essentially clones of Naver Answers.

Two things come to mind with this design:

1. It’s too busy.

OK, 3-column displays are back, like Ask 3D. Fine. And linked sections. OK. Now, I’m not terribly familiar with Taylor Swift, but presumably people who do queries on her are looking for fairly specific things, which is why the top relevant items should click so well, and related searches should do well. Come on, I know Microsoft has prior knowledge of what people do when they make that query. But this design ignores that in favor of bombarding the user with every facet of knowledge that is present.

2. They’re going for the women.

Huh?

Remember a year ago when Ask.com decided to abandon its quest to be a general, all-purpose search engine to everyone and just focus on women? A lot of people heaped scorn on the idea. I personally thought it was good; in any business, you need to identify and service your customer. Trying to be something, or everything, to everybody typically doesn’t go over well. And there are plenty of examples of niche search products doing well… for example, my original project, MetaCrawler, is still doing reasonable business for InfoSpace for a small cadre of a few million people that want to search multiple search engines at once. It won’t get you a trillion-dollar valuation, but it’ll make a good living for a 100-person company.

Well, when the showcase image is an entertainer, it means the features are going to be very heavily skewed towards people who want to search around and consume a lot, especially in the entertainment space. People who like Celebrity xRank, another feature Microsoft has been touting for a while. These are not features for the Microsoft Office Information Worker segment. No, these are features targeted at the same demographics as People Magazine - older women, typically stay-at-home mom, controlling the family buying. Now, don’t get me wrong, that’s a great demographic to target, and People Magazine just prints money every month. But, well… really? That’s the demographic?