Filed under: Search Engine Marketing
Friday, Microsoft announced that Steven Berkowitz, formerly CEO of Ask.com, would head up its MSN and Windows Live operations. Berkowitz was previously CEO of IDG Books, which publishes the “Dummies” series. More recently, in an odd twist to the old “the butler did it” theme, Berkowitz was a chief suspect in the demise of Ask’s helpful butler Jeeves. At Microsoft, he’ll head up the software firm’s Internet effort. And when we last reported on search engine market shares, Ask.com While perhaps not in complete chaos, Microsoft’s online efforts haven’t been able to gain appreciable share against rivals Google or Yahoo.
The Seattle Times lists some quotes from Berkowitz in an effort to gain some insight into how he might steer Microsoft’s efforts:
“We know our technology is awesome, but our biggest challenge is to get people to understand we’re not a question-and-answer product.” — eWeek, Aug. 9, 2005“When you go into a store and you watch how people buy books and reference books specifically, they open the book, they look at the table of contents and they look at the index. What is the index but search? Search, to me, wasn’t a revolutionary idea. It was evolutionary.” — San Jose Mercury News, April 9, 2006
Needless to say, the blogosphere is buzzing with the surprise announcement. Rustybrick at SERoundtable has a nice summary of news and discussion forum links. John Battelle reports that rumors about the move had been flying for some time, and broke the story early in the game.
It will be interesting to see if Berkowitz will be able to shake up Microsoft’s less-than-dynamic Web efforts. He achieved a significant turnaround at Ask, and showed he wasn’t afraid to kill off sacred cows if necessary.
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