Huddled Masses

There’s an article on CNN Money today about Google, Yahoo, MSN and IE 7 … rather interesting, if you read between the lines a little bit. Basically, Google has gone to the EU and the USDOJ to “express concerns” (read “whine”) about Microsoft’s new web browser.

Apparently Microsoft decided that they should copy the little search box from Firefox, but chose to point the IE version of the search box at MSN search rather than Google (by default). Google thinks this is an abuse of a monopoly —Microsoft’s IE owns about 85% of the browser market and although it has been loosing ground for 4 years, the announcement of a new version has completely flattened out that trend in the last few months. Google is stating this would be an unfair grab of web traffic and advertising dollars. Instead, they want Microsoft to offer users a choice (during installation) of what the default search engine should be. Of course, Yahoo! is very much in agreement with this, but Microsoft says that to offer such a choice during install would be too complex unless they arbitrarily limited the choice of search engines.

Clearly Microsoft’s competitors won’t be happy until Microsoft completely stops cross-marketing. I actually wondered for a moment if Microsoft would complain about Google abusing their power to distribute an alternative browser (Firefox)... with Google baked in as the default. It certainly has helped Firefox gain market share from IE. However, despite what many geeks think is an overwhelming dominance by Google, it turns out that as of March, Google’s share of web searches still only 42% ... which is really not exactly a monopoly, although it is nearly 60% more than their nearest competitor … with Yahoo! in free fall at 28%, MSN at 13, Time-Warner at 7.6% (proof that browser homepages matter) and Ask at 6% (up 1% over the last year, interestingly enough). However, Google currently gets nearly 49% of searches which start in browser toolbars, and Yahoo gets 46% ... if Microsoft’s IE starts shipping with MSN as the default (and particularly if their security model makes it harder for Google and Yahoo! to put their search toolbars on the browser prominently, it could make a significant dent in the overall traffic.

One thing really struck me as odd about the article was that the writer missed the comparison to Netscape. But then, maybe it’s just me. Do you see the similarity?

• 1995-1998 Microsoft creates a new product (Internet Explorer) which takes on the existing #1 browser (Netscape had nearly 90% market share in 1996). Largely by virtue of being the (_free_) default browser provided as part of operating system upgrades to the #1 monopoly OS … Microsoft crushes the competition in less than 4 years, with over 60% market share in 1999, and peaking around 90% in 2003 (at which point they stopped releasing new versions).

• 2005-? Microsoft revamps old product (MSN Search) to compete against the existing #1 search engine (Google has at least 4 times their market share — most bloggers would claim this is around 80-90% share of web searches, ignoring the official statistics which take all pages owned by the companies into account). Largely by virtue of being the free default search engine provided in the #1 monopoly browser (IE still owns over 80% of the browser market) ... we’ll have to wait and see, I guess.

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