Microsoft Copycat Strategy Continues With Street Side
- By: kidmercury [privmsg - website] On 28th Feb 2006 In
Alex Barnett and Michael Arrignton's Tech Crunch point to Microsoft Street-Side, a new offering from Microsoft that's part of their local search marketing efforts. Like A9, Street Side offers pictures of local areas. Tech Crunch reports:
The service will initially target San Francisco and Seattle only due to the massive number of images needed to support make it work (rumors are 10 million + images per city).
And why is Microsoft doing this?
The street-side initiative is a key part of our vision to deliver an immersive digital representation of the real world that enables users to know their surroundings, find what they are looking for and know how to get there.
- Y! MyWeb
interesting how important viral/buzz is these days
This further demonstrates to me how important the viral buzz marketing factors are for big players today. With all that money and potential in local search (should anyone find a way to make it fast, easy, convenient and effective for the consumer), we continue to go for the flash that gets popular attention.
Give me a couponing system that delivers a fast direct convenient incentive for the consumer to use my local search and they will adopt in en-masse to get the economic advantage. Absent that, give me some flash that gets me digg-like waves of short-attention-span web traffic I can wave in front of investors and the press.
also
this forced ajax stuff is useless on a pda.
Too bad A9 sucks and never
Too bad A9 sucks and never capitalized on their idea.