Ten years ago, if a Martian from the future visited me at the offices of Wired, and told me that Microsoft would be announcing this, I’d have run him out of the building. No, wait, I would have interviewed him and put him on the cover, come to think of it.
Sure, not surprising to us at the moment, but really, think about what Microsoft was back in the 90s, and what this means now. From the LiveSide post:
At Advertising Week 2006 in New York, Microsoft is set to unveil a new unified global advertising initiative. Under Digital Advertising Solutions, advertisers will be able to more easily reach customers by packaging Microsoft’s products, including Xbox, MSN, Windows Live, Office, Windows Mobile, and Microsoft TV under one advertising solution….Clearly Microsoft is not only targeting Google and Yahoo with this advertisement push, but also TV and print media as well.
Recall the days when Microsoft was a software company? Recall that Wired cover when we claimed they were, in fact, a media company? Ah, good times.
Thanks for the quote, and I love the creative post!
@Matthew
This actually fits to the amount of people they are hireing in germany alone. they are more than doubling their staff and are already something like 20 here. Sales people. They, as always, really want this and are prepared to pay well for it.
what’s up with the junky archive link? wired doesn’t do archives or something??
There is something about this post that I really love. The looking back at 1996 and comparing it todays announcement worked out great.
The more things change the more they stay the same?
I can’t help but think that a LOT of data and analysis remains to shake out with all this media convergence. As informed people know, contextual advertising is vastly superior to old print and TV models, yet the big players are lining up to deliver the same old (crappy, low ROI ad campaigns) in new ways. Is this because they believe in those old crappy models or because they can’t get advertisers to snap out of their ignorance or ?
Google will be down due to click fraud exposure: the story slowly is coming to the surface:
http://yahoo.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_40/b4003001.htm
I love the history of business. GE was a light bulb company, a mainframe company, and I hear they still do some stuff. I wonder what MS will be doing in 2075.
>>>Google will be down due to click fraud exposure: the story slowly is coming to the surface…
That BW story is poorly researched and full of half-truths and inaccuracies. But most interestingly GOOG did not show any weakness during the week of that story’s release. The stock fell significantly on the 18th due to an irrelevant report about Yahoo’s ad business before the BW story though.
If they shorted Goog over at BW they’re paying for it now. 🙂