Murdoch and Microsoft Have Got It Wrong

Murdosoft Fighting the Wrong War

The news about Murdoch and Microsoft is interesting. Two businesses in terminal decline, print newspapers and desk top computing, getting together to slow down the shifts in business models made possible by the Internet.

Murdoch is losing advertising business to Google, and Microsoft is losing mindshare to the same guys. So the two getting together to rain on the Google parade makes sense, if we don’t take the time to understand what’s really going on with the Web.

Whilst Murdoch and Microsoft would like to turn the clock back to 1997, when we paid AOL and Yahoo for access to the content THEY chose to provide, Google is fighting the battle of 2011 when new services will be helping us access content WE choose. Google is under threat as well, and not from obvious competitors.

If it’s real? the discussion assumes Google will dominate Search of open content for the foreseeable future, but there’s a battle for Search building which may see the decline of Google sooner rather than later.

Can this really be true?

Let’s look at

Google’s Challenges

* Whilst it’s destroying other advertising markets, advertising itself is dying. Some sources suggest 93% of college graduates NEVER click on sponsored links, preferring user generated content for information about what to buy. Influence is moving from brand to content.

* It dominates Search right now, but at a cost to both Google and it’s users. The concept of indexing the entire web sounds fantastic. But 95% of web pages are virus ridden man traps. Another 4% are spam – machine generated copies of bits of other pages. Of the 1% real content probably half is Keyword engineered, designed to dominate the index but with very little inherent value. Another quarter is limited to personal stuff. Google’s costs for indexing all of this rubbish are enormous, and the results aren’t that impressive. It really isn’t very good at sorting the wheat from the chaff. We have to do that.

* There’s a battalion of sites collecting lists of web pages selected by users for their value. Whenever we bookmark a web page we’re selecting the best for Delicious, Foxmarks, and lots of others. Whenever we post something on the new blogging sites – Tumblr, Posterous, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc we’re selecting for them the best pages, and even categorising them. The same is true whenever we Digg, or Diigo, or Stumble, or share on a hundred other sites. These guys will soon provide superior results to people Searching for content, at a fraction of the cost.

* Google isn’t “sticky” at least in terms of Search. There’s no entertainment to go along with the information – Infotainment – whereas all the others are. Users hang out on their preferred sites when they aren’t Searching. They don’t on Google.

Where’s the New Business Model

Murdoch and Microsoft should be figuring what the business model will be for all these social sharing sites because that’s the real threat to them, and to Google.

What about simple guys like us just trying to make a living? We need to be figuring that out too, and get there before the big guys.