I just read in Advertising Age that Microsoft is planning to spend as much as $100M on a marketing campaign for its new “Kumo” search engine. For perspective, that’s about as much as they spent to acquire Powerset, and almost as much as Endeca’s revenue in 2007. And they’re spending it on ads. I’m not an Apple fan boy by any means, but I can’t help thinking of this “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” clip. Still, in a multi-billion dollar business, I suppose $100M is chump change.
But what jumped out at me from the article was this paragraph:
According to one person close the situation, the forthcoming campaign will be careful to not position “Kumo” as a competitor to Yahoo or Google and instead cast it as a reimagined search engine that ups the game by yielding fewer but more-focused results. The proposed strategy is probably a good — if not the only — way to go.
That sounds a lot like…Duck Duck Go. I know that Stefan Weitz, director of Live Search, and Gabriel Weinberg, who is Duck Duck Go, at least occasionally read this blog. I’m curious if my observations are even close, and what the coincidence of vision bodes either effort. I assume that Weinberg isn’t planning to spend $100M on advertising.
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