First there was msn.com, Microsoft’s first attempt to become a major online player. Users were told that this would become the one portal that they would need to go to for all their needs. At that time, it was a competition to portals like Netscape and AOL.
Then came along live.com..Microsoft’t second attempt to bring all it’s on-line properties into one place. And live had(s) some really good features (skydrive, sync, spaces). Esp the revamped hotmail, now called live mail. Life was good right..
No..Microsoft then decides to spend a couple hundred million dollars to launch and promote Bing, it’s new search engine.
So you might be wondering, where is the confusion!! msn.com is for content, live.com is for services and bing.com is the search engine. Makes sense right?? Well, for some reason, Microsoft decides to redirect anyone going to live.com (the site that was once promoted as the only home page you ever need to visit) to the bing site. What about average Joe, that just wants to get to his e-mail and goes to live.com? Well, he gets redirected to bing. And can he at least get a link to his old mail services from the bing home page? NO!! One would think that is common sense, but then I am not smarter than the marketing/product folks at Microsoft :). Or is this just a clever way to drive more traffic to bing to increase it’s exposure? I think that is the case. Take a look at the web ranking from Alexa, comparing bing to live.com and msn.com
Now, if you dig deeper into the clickstream data for bing.com (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bing.com#clickstream), you will see that roughly 70% of the traffic originating from live.com is going back to live.com (p.s. : This is a back of the napkin calculation 🙂 ).
Let’s compare that to the all knowing Google God’s way of doing things? If you go to Google.com and click on More at the top you can see links to all the services Google offers. And if you do the same thing on Bing.com, you don’t get the big picture of what Microsoft can offer..
All I am asking Microsoft is to put a link to http://home.live.com (the home page for all live services) on Bing.
Also, it would help Microsoft to start backing up all those millions of dollars in ad money with real content in it’s search engine. I used “kudithipudi” (yes.. I am pretty selfish 😉 ) as a search term in the major search engines and here is the ranking by the number of results
