Microsoft Adopts Web 22

Two years ago, in a post entitled Web 22 - Where Everybody Has A Share, I imagined a future in which we'd get beyond merely giving things away to attract online eyeballs. Instead, I proposed Web 22, where we pay people to come to our sites and click on stuff. 

This business model was actually perfected in World War II and documented by Joseph Heller in his novel Catch-22. Milo Minderbinder, whose Nobel Prize in Economics is long overdue, is the genius behind this business model. He explains it to Yossarian, who is puzzled about why Milo buys eggs in Malta for seven cents and sells them to the mess hall for five cents, that he actually makes a profit because "everybody has a share."

Well, it seems that Steve Balmer, who almost "missed the internet" and has been playing catchup ever since through the Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 eras, has decided not to be late to Web  22. The Softies recently announced two programs that pay you to use their search engine, Live Search. The Live Search Cashback program pays you to search for products using Live Search. Live Search Perks awards you virtual tickets for each Live Search, that you can redeem  for prizes.

This is, of course, another desperate attempt to yank search share away from market leader Google. It is another in a long line of flailing actions taken be a company that ought to forget about web search, online advertising and its Yahoo-like collection of disparate web properties. Microsoft needs to focus on what Ray Ozzie is working on, cloud infrastructure (the recently announced Azure) and applications seamlessly linked to a wide range of computing devices. That is what the internet means to Microsoft, the means of delivering operating system services and applications analogous to Windows and Office to masses of users and developers. 

Microsoft should focus on monetizing these new offerings in innovative ways. Sure, some of that may be via ads, which they should cheerfully place through Google. But I did say "innovative" and the ability to truly innovate seems to be in short supply in Redmond.