That was Dec 2006. Looking back today in Aug 2009, it seems that this was one more product Microsoft failed at.

If anybody remembers using this product, it NEVER worked. I’m in this domain myself as an engineer. I’ve read the papers which the Microsoft China team published on these topics. However they were never able to do a decent-ass job on the product extraction and search. I know through friends that the 50 person China team working on this project was shut down.

Looks like microsoft is not good at search. They’ve released bing recently which is doing an ok job, but it sucks at shopping. Well, froogle sucks too, but that’s another story.

Microsoft Live Products был запущен сегодня по адресу products.live.com. Они уже включили предложения от 100,000 продавцов. Аналогично Froogle, Live Products является зат…

Microsoft, I think, realizes that the only way to become an order of magnitude better than the existing players and start getting a piece of the REAL pie, the one dominated by Amazon and eBay, is to tap the long tail (obligatory nod to Chris Anderson, http://www.thelongtail.com). The competition doesn’t center around iPods, which you can get anywhere. It’s about specialty items. And the only way to reach smaller specialty stores is through a “pull” (or crawl-and-extract) model. Froogle and Yahoo don’t rely on crawling because they CAN’T – they haven’t solved the extraction problem. Microsoft seems to be closer but it doesn’t organize results very well or search by price or features.

I think Microsoft wasted a chance to change the rules of the game by not building a semantic web product search engine. By inviting more competition it would have risked to hurt Microsoft in this sector but would\’ve surely hurt the market leader Goo…

I dont have the numbers, but I would guess based on the number of users that both Yahoo and Google have, the competition is against Yahoo Shopping and not against Froogle. Unless of course you believe that any service Google currently provides is the real thing to beat.

By this logic Wallop would be an Orkut competitor and not a MySpace competitor, right?

However, Froogle after many years has failed to gain any meaningful traction. Shopping.com is far superior. I guess this is a category where the vertical players are still far ahead of the pack.

Microsoft Live Products launched today at products.live.com….

In thinking about this more, musing over the “1.6 billion into MSN” so recently quoted, and in an effort to make this comment useful, I have to wonder at some of the reactions people (still) have about Microsoft’s Live efforts. It’s obvious that Microsoft is taking this VERY seriously; not betting the farm (as they did, arguably, with Hailstorm), but making a serious attempt to be the best.

A large number of Live! efforts are closing the gap with competitors. There are unique elements to many of these, but it’s still primarily feature parity. It’s products like Windows Live Product Search that make me think on the strategic direction of Microsoft.

Google’s strategic direction is fairly simple. They are an advertising company – every single service they have is advertising-focused. Google receives a large amount of praise for this )free products!), which isn’t justified in terms of revenue model. The most intruiging thing about Google is how they buy products for a strategic focus and then do absolutely nothing with them.

Let’s take Picasa, Blogger, and Hello! as an example. Hello! is an Instant Messenger program focused around sharing images, and integrates very niely with Blogger and Picasa. However, Google goes ahead and releases a basic Jabber client that integrates with Gmail, entirely bypassing the Blogger/Picasa/Hello angle. Nonetheless, it’s obvious that Blogger will eventually integrate very closely with GMail, and Picasa+Hello will play some part in a image sharing product.

It’s very strategic – buy companies that are still on the cheap, and then let them by and large idle until Google needs to release a product.

I’m still not sure what to think about it. On the one hand, it could be strategic – on the other hand, it could easily be a sign of internal chaos; growing too fast, project sponsors moving in and out of new jobs this dropping their project. People get reassigned based on new iniatiaves/etc – given how fast Google is growing, I wouldn’t be surpised by some of this. They have the profit margin to afford to be inefficient in terms of using all their assets; focusing on expanding their lead in Search and Advertising MUST be the overriding goal (given Google’s success over the past year with search marketshare, this is unsuprising).

Jumping back a bit from that side tour, I think the most interesting Google product out there now is Google Base. Google Base accumulates information, and is mutually beneficial. The listers get their product listed in Google easily, and Google can pull from a database of highly structured information – creating *instant* vertical search engines. It’s really an expansion of Froogle, and to some extent a spiritual successor to Web Directories. It gives Google a huge headstart for “search in depth” as opposed to the traditional web “search in breadth.”

Microsoft doesn’t have a competing product there. Everything Live is a service (and with advertising, so far, poorly integrated). There is obviously a huge investment into becoming a traffic-generating giant, but I’m uncertain as to how focused Microsoft’s online strategy actually IS.

Windows Live Products is a very interesting technological trick that emulates some tech Yahoo! has had for years, but that’s around it. Windows Live Shopping is a UI upgrade to an already excellent service in MSN Shopping. Windows Live Expo is a rather facinating experiment in social selling, yet to be proven. Windows Live QnA looks like a “me-too” response to Yahoo! Answers (an area Google has neglected). The list goes on; Microsoft is being innovative in terms of interface and AJAX (which is not necessarily a good thing), but doesn’t have a coherent strategy for making money, or killing Google.

I do hope the above was useful. It seems, now, to be rather chaotic and unorganized. I suppose that’s an advantage of commenting – no real editorial oversight needed

- Michael