Microsoft and Yahoo turn on the buzzword firehose

July 29, 2009 | Anthony Ha | Comments | |

firefightersMicrosoft and Yahoo are shaking up the web search landscape today with their just-announced partnership. But before returning you to our regularly scheduled business analysis, I’d like to take a moment to celebrate the way Microsoft and Yahoo shared the news. Normally, talking about PR stuff is a little too inside baseball for me, but honestly, the companies’ efforts set some kind of gold standard for the relentless, undiscriminating use of near-meaningless buzzwords.

Here’s Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer:

Success in search requires both innovation and scale. With our new Bing search platform, we’ve created breakthrough innovation and features. This agreement with Yahoo! will provide the scale we need to deliver even more rapid advances in relevancy and usefulness. Microsoft and Yahoo! know there’s so much more that search could be. This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search.

And here’s Yahoo chief executive Carol Bartz:

Users will continue to experience search as a vital part of their Yahoo! experiences and will enjoy increased innovation thanks to the scale and resources this deal provides. Advertisers will also benefit from scale and enjoy greater ease of use and efficiencies working with a single platform and sales team for premium advertisers. Finally, this deal will help us increase our investments in priority areas in winning audience properties, display advertising capabilities and mobile experiences.

Platform! Innovation! Scale! Innovation! Scale! Scale! Platform! Perhaps the epitome of this approach is the new web site the companies have created “to provide consumers, advertisers and publishers with additional information about the benefits of the agreement.” So far, that additional information consists of a press release and brief videos that have been posted elsewhere — not exactly a wealth of answers, but hey, at least we know the deal is all about, “Choice. Value. Innovation.” Whatever that means.

Oh, and if you want to hear more exciting discussion about innovation and scale, I’ve embedded Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s videos below.

[image:flickr/MedEvac71]

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • csun
    >> "near-meaningless buzzwords"

    When I think of buzzwords, I think of things like Web 2.0, Ajax, cloud computing,
    social networking, "going green", netbooks, and the iPhone.
    "Scale" and "innvoation" don't come to mind.

    I guess you mean their press release is full of BS.
    From that perspective, I get your point.

    Having said that, "scale and innovation" REALLY are the things
    that are needed to beat Google. They might come off as BS
    but they are a succinct way of describing their goals.
    Bing needs more searches (audience) and more advertisers.
    And of course, Bing needs better algorithms to produce better search results
    and higher monetizing ads next to the search results. Scale and innovation.
  • don't forget choice. and value
  • I agree that scale and innovation are important, but my main point is that they're such vague terms that it's hard to know exactly what Ballmer and Bartz mean when they repeat them. For starters, I haven't seen anything in the details of this deal that has much to do with actual product innovation.
  • Struggling Search company + uncool software company does NOT = Google killer