Life, distilled by Will Critchlow

I assume you’ve seen the river of red ink caused by Microsoft’s lengthy excursion into the search engine game:

Here’s what I’d do if I ran Microsoft and was playing the long (5-10 years) game:

1. Realise that I don’t need to win the search engine wars to thrive, but I do need to win at something new
2. Choose my “something new”
3. Do a deal with Yahoo! to ensure that I power the #2 and #3 search engines in the English-speaking world (check)
4. Close down Bing (and Yahoo!) leaving Google with a 95%+ market share in the US
5. Bonus points for selling Bing.com (the domain) to Google
6. Partner with Facebook to lobby aggressively to prevent Google using their (new-found) monopoly in search to grow G+
7. ???
8. Profit

Just a thought experiment. Written very much to provoke debate rather than to espouse an actual point of view. As Scott Adams says:

Warning: This blog is written for a rational audience that likes to have fun wrestling with unique or controversial points of view. It is written in a style that can easily be confused as advocacy or opinion. It is not intended to change anyone’s beliefs or actions. If you quote from this post or link to it, which you are welcome to do, please take responsibility for whatever happens if you mismatch the audience and the content.