But it doesn’t know who. The bottomless pockets of Microsoft’s wallet are open, ready and willing to buy a company. Not surprisingly no one wants to be bought by Microsoft. I don’t know if Yahoo! was the first company that Microsoft tried to court for the low low price of $50 billion but Yahoo! said no. Also, in its infinite wisdom Microsoft tried to beat Google on the internet advertizing turf, and failed.

Whatever the case, Microsoft does have some recent acquisitions but I would question whether or not it worked out for them and not all do. The one that comes to my mind is the acquisition of Giant AntiSpyware. Microsoft could now produce its “own” antispyware application and tackle the growing concern of the lack of security on windows. It was first known as Microsoft Antispyware and then became Windows Defender, here we are today and it isn’t working out quite as well as hoped.

While I applaud Microsoft for keeping the original Giant Antispyware employees, the program lacks what it had originally, functionality and effectiveness. Windows Defender missed nearly 33% of threats in a PC World test with almost every other competing product scoring better. Giant Antispyware was in the leagues of the greats at one point, what happened?

I’m not here to analyze that; I’m just saying that some things Microsoft thinks will work out don’t. Microsoft does need a good search engine, though the paranoid among us refuse to use Google, I think they’re one short circuit away from going to the funny farm but maybe that’s just me, you crazy silly people. Ever used MSN search, ever used Live Search, of course you have… once… ever use it again, probably not, because the results are terrible. Ever use Google, sure, kept using Google, probably… why, because the results are awesome. Yahoo! will play second wheel to Google on the search front but is winning the “social networking” revolution compared to Google.

I don’t care for “social networking” because most of the people using it aren’t that intelligent, not that there aren’t smart people on it but most tend to avoid it. MySpace, Facebook and the other similar sites are a waste in my opinion and I’m not far from hating each and every one of them.

Microsoft might be tempted to acquire any one of the companies I mentioned in here but if I were them, I would not plan on it working out like some of their internal analysts might think. With all the talent at Microsoft, you would think someone there could build them a new, better search engine from the ground up but I guess when you can buy one for $50 billion why waste time on development and testing.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 3:55 am under Microsoft, Technology.

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.
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