Microsoft Way Ahead Of Google
Well, probably not in search. However, they are very proud of the fact that their Live Maps is now incorporating 3-D, photo-realistic cityscapes, which puts them ahead of Google.
And they’re right – that is cool. How about some cities outside the US?
Microsoft also plan to leverage these 3-D maps for advertising purposes:
“Microsoft will integrate ads into these 3D models in a way it considers organic, by displaying them on virtual billboards the users will encounter as they zip around the cities, Figueroa said”
November 6th, 2006 at 11:09 pm
I’m very interested to see what MSN / Live Search does in the next year or two. If you keep tabs on the company’s media releases and such, it seems they have set their sites pretty high … like Google high.
When a company all but drops their brand name (MSN >> Live), you know they have big aspirations.
Nice post Peter. Thanks for that.
-Brandon
November 7th, 2006 at 3:14 pm
I suspect the reason they appear to be dropping the MSN name is that it may have negative associations (associated with the past) confuses people (associated with chat) and they want to be seen as being part of a new paradigm (Web 2.0).
I was part of a Microsoft search evaluation team called SearchChamps a while back. When I was in Redmond, there was a fair amount of discussion around the name of the service – not all at MS were wanting to keep the name MSN.