Microsoft Monday
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Written By Reprise Media | June 26, 2006 | Share This
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It’s Monday. It’s raining (again). What’s a better pick me up than some quick hits from the brains behind everyone’s favorite third-place engine?
“We’re gonna need a bigger ad” We don’t much cotton to regular old newspapers anymore (the ink gets all over our hands), but someone at ClickZ spotted Microsoft’s ad in the New York Times business section today - it actually would have been kind of hard to miss. They’re using a colorful full-page ad to talk some big talk about adCenter, boasting way better conversion rates than the competition: 48 percent better than Yahoo! and 57 percent better than Google. Don’t take our word for it, check out the landing page.
“Like, does spam, like, really exist, man?” Out on the Webmaster World forum, MSN is getting existential about spam. A rep, MSNdude, asked readers to help give the engine a clearer idea of what they mean when they complain about spammy search results. He differentiates “junk” (”a useless result for any imaginable query”) from “spam” (”a bad search engine result caused by someone doing something over and over again where once should have been enough”), and implies that spam can sometimes be useful, and even authoritative (if still annoying). Barry Schwartz rounds up the main points here.
Now that’s a foundation It’s a good thing Bill Gates has more time to work on his philanthropy, because he’s going to have to figure out what do with a boatload more money. Forbes says that financial guru Warren Buffett is giving $37 billion of his Berkshire Hathaway stock to Bill and Melinda’s foundation, just about doubling its assets over the next several years. It’ll start with a $1.5 billion dollar gift, followed each year by about a similar amount until the earmarked funds are exhausted. One string’s attached: Buffett wants each installment spent in the year it was given, making for a kind of annual “Brewster’s Millions” for billionaire philanthropists.
Topics: Microsoft |