If You Can’t Get People to Use Your Product for Free, You Can Always Pay Them to Use It!

That is, if you are Microsoft and practically own the world anyway… so, you have a product that is lame, you can’t get folks to use it… so you PAY them to use it… oh yeah… that makes sense!

Microsoft to Pay Business for Using Live Search

“Microsoft is now offering to pay businesses through service or training credits if they get their employees to use its Live Search product at work. The amount of the payment would be based on the number of search queries served. While many may view this as a sign of desperation from a company whose search share badly lags behind that of competitors Google and Yahoo, Microsoft is attempting to spin it in a different way. Currently Google serves about half of all search queries, followed by Yahoo that serves about 24 percent. Microsoft has around an 8 percent search share, Neilsen/NetRatings reports. The company claims that feedback gained from the program would be used to improve Live Search for enterprise use. However, at the same time the program could raise the company’s search share, thus allowing the company to sell more advertising and highlight its other related products.”

Which is what it is all about… you get enough “eyes” viewing your content, and you sell more products. So, maybe they ARE crazy… like a fox!