Bill Gates admitted in a recent interview that the company had made mistakes and that Google had, "done a great job on search and what they've done with advertising." Gates also said that the company would prefer not to be playing catch-up as, "we always want to be in the lead, making the breakthroughs".
To help close the gap between MSN and Google, Microsoft announced last week that it would invest about $2 billion more than previously expected on new business ventures in 2007, primarily MSN, Windows Live and bulking up the level of exclusive content available on MSN, aka MSN Originals.
The bold plans from Microsoft have seen the launch of a Windows Live beta version and the latest release of the Internet Explorer browser. MSN has also discarded Yahoo! as a pay-per-click advertising provider and has, in turn, launched the Microsoft AdCenter. However there is speculation that Microsoft may have a view to some form of partnership deal through purchasing an equity stake in the Yahoo! portal.
Messenger is another product which is currently being developed to make in-roads into areas of online activities which are at present dominated by Microsoft's competitors. The beta testing which is taking place in Australia aims to make Messenger into more of a social networking tool, an arena that is seeing some growth within internet communities.
Microsoft is also becoming increasingly protective over its brand activities, with the IE7 browser using MSN search facilities as their default search setting, and the Microsoft Adcenter currently not supporting their main browser rival, Firefox, which utilises Google as its default.
Whether these plans are enough to bring Microsoft up to the level of Google in terms of search and online advertising remains to be seen, but with the recent defection of Amazon and Alexa to MSN from Google, Microsoft is off to a good start. However Bill Gates has been keen to state that in this particular field Microsoft are, "kind of new", but he also wanted to ensure that they are not counted out of the search race, "I think this is a rare case where we are being underestimated," he went on to point out, "That doesn't happen very often."
