Insider blogging: the IE default wars continue

Posted May 2nd 2006 12:47PM by Sarah Gilbert
Filed under: Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO), Insider Blogging

Everyone's talking about the big showdown of the old Evil Empire (Microsoft) and the up-and-coming dark horse contender of Evil (none other than the faux?-friendly Google).

IE program manager Dave Massy gives us the party line at the IEBlog. "The typical default when users install IE7 on their Windows XP machines will most likely be their usual search engine. Despite claims from some people around the web, MSN is not 'The Default,'" he tells us. Although, it is true, corporate administrators could set the default on a group of employee's machines, he says, it just hasn't been an issue in beta testing. For once, I'm not going to give my usual disclaimer about not believing the party line -- in my opinion, Massy is shooting straight from the hip here.

Even Yahoo! uber-blogger Jeremy Zawodny weighs in (interestingly, never mentioning Yahoo!'s interest in the debate).

He echoes my own sentiment, e.g., "Cry me a river..." and has this to say about Google's insistence that Microsoft isn't allowing the user to choose their searcher: "If Google actually cared about user choice, they'd have asked the Mozilla Foundation to configure Firefox to prompt you to choose your favorite search engine the first time you ran it. You know, a level playing field." [She types into her Firefox browser, handy Google search at the ready.]

So Yahoo! bloggers must have a corporate-ordered zip on their lips about Yahoo! Tech. A company spokeperson (Elizabeth Harz, category development officer for Yahoo Media Sales' technology and telecommunications categories, I wonder what size font her business card uses?), however, talks to Advertising Age about the latest, biggest and most sexy thing in gadgets and software. For Yahoo!, it's all about that $953 million -- that's the amount consumer technology, software and telecom companies spend online. Harz says shes hopes Yahoo! Tech will let "advertisers talk to a different consituent," largely through providing aggregated and user-generated content.

There's hardly anything new here - hello, Epinions and Amazon.com. But I think shareholders can only be happy if Yahoo! turns some of that $953 mil into profits. There's hardly anything being spent for original content, they say, so maybe profits won't be that far away.

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