Will Microsoft’s Live Search Turn Into Kumo?
Try and try till you succeed! Well, this is the mantra Microsoft Inc. seems to be chanting since a very long time to have a formidable position in the search market. As ‘Google’ sits comfortable on the throne ruling the Web territory, Microsoft is finding out ways to dethrone it through various strategies, the latest one being re-branding its popular search engine ‘Windows Live Search’. Though this is not confirmed so far, speculations that the software major is exploring avenues to revamp Live Search are spreading like fire on the Web.
According to rumors, Microsoft has supposedly bought the domain Kumo.com already and has been busy securing other variants as well such as .net, .in, etc. Since the registration of kumo.com last week, several have started considering that Microsoft is about to re-launch Live Search with a brand new name in the coming few months.
You may be wondering “what Kumo means?” the answer to which is that it is a Japanese term for “cloud” and “spider”, as stated by LiveSide.net. Amazingly, both these words gel with the concept of search technology.
It was only lately that Microsoft came up with its ‘software plus services’ strategy as a step to compete with Google, which resulted into confusion in sorting out the various services and names, as noted by some industry observers. Just to remind, Live.com includes variety of server, client as well as social networking services and software under its brand.
Considering that Microsoft is certain to replace Live Search with Kumo, one can clearly understand that the struggling search player would now set its sight on energizing the new brand rather than caring much about fulfilling its ambitions to acquire Yahoo, at least in the short run.
However, as Microsoft has not been able to perform in the search business as efficiently as its core software business, it would be interesting to see whether Kumo.com will have any effect on the Web user’s behavior. Though innovate, Live.com failed to prosper in the last few months despite Microsoft luring users to get paid for utilizing the service.
As discussed earlier in this blog, Google is rapidly capturing more and more percentage of the search market year after year. This has created problems for other popular search players such as Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.com to tackle Google’s aggressive behavior. Hence, whatever Microsoft does, it will have to face several tough challenges to break the loyalty of Google users. For now though, it can only hope to keep the search ‘Sumo’ quiet with its “Kumo”!
