adrianmott.com

I know that Microsoft has to have a presence in the space, and for them not to be present is ‘giving up’ per se, something Steve Ballmer doesn’t appear to have in his vocabulary.  So with the Yahoo acquisitions failed or at a stand still, Microsoft is all set and ready to announce their latest search venture: Bing.com.  Apparently, their favicon was visible for a short time today according to TechCrunch (ugly as hell I might add, MG Siegler is right):

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/26/microsofts-bing-logo-leaked-by-way-of-favicon/

Here’s my issue with the whole thing: there are PLENTY of things that Microsoft does well, obviously.  From dominating the desktop OS market for years and years to producing a video game system that’s arguably best of breed and also competitively priced.  So why spend so many resources on the search market (a rumored $80-$100 million on just the marketing campaign for Bing)?  Google on the other hand has a firm grasp on the industry and only spent $25 million on ALL marketing activity last year.

Microsoft is huge and corporate, but should take some lessons from lean development and agile operations and focus on what they do well.  While they are busy trying to keep up with Apple and Google in the MP3 and search markets, they are losing share of other industries they used to own like the OS and browser markets.  It’s a lesson that in technology, it pays to be lean, simple and efficient.

Here’s a screen shot of the search engine before it was renamed to Bing: