For a supposed technology company, Microsoft sure fails to compete technologically when it comes to search. Instead of actually building a better search engine, they’re bribing newspapers in a feeble attempt to hurt a rival search engine.
We already know that Microsoft Bing is offering newspapers “premium placement” in exchange for delisting themselves from Google. Now they’ve gotten more direct, simply offering to pay newspapers to delist themselves from Google.
The biggest fool they’ve approached with their plan? Why, News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch, of course! The old man’s been threatening to delist his newspapers from Google, anyway. He thinks Google “steals” from him. Never mind that one of Rupert’s biggest newspapers, the Wall Street Journal, gets one-fourth of its traffic from Google. Microsoft will be happy to foot the bill for Rupert’s lost revenue! That’s how much they hate Google! That’s how badly they can’t compete! Never mind that we now swim in a such a huge ocean of media choices that Google users won’t even notice the absence of newspapers in search results!
Goddammit. This whole Bing-Murdoch deal is just one big circus of arrogance, incompetence, and spite.
Originally posted on November 23, 2009 @ 7:23 am