How Vista has helped Live.com
Tags: Marketing, Microsoft, SEO
Look, I’m just gonna get this disclaimer out of the way now; if given the choice between a computer running Mac, Windows or Linux … I would be all over the Linux computer like granny in her Buick on a Florida sidewalk. So yes I do have a bit of bias here, however it is only restricted to the non-related issues not mentioned in my research.
With the growing consumer marketshare in everything that isn’t Microsoft, sometimes I feel bad for for the boys up in Redmond. Mozilla Firefox is out there offering a superior web browser along with their popular mail client Thunderbird for free, all the different flavors of Linux operating systems that are kicking XP square in the pants on so many things (also free), OpenOffice providing an intuitive and intelligent office productivity app (free as well); you just can’t help but to stand there and shake your head in sympathy.
But despite the Open Source flood that is snatching up market share left and right from this juggernaut, things are slowly looking brighter for them since the release of their long overdue operating system Vista. Everybody and their mom knew that Live.com and the built in system search features would be tightly integrated with each other. But now, we have a few months of real data to work with to see if this crass force-feeding is boosting usage for Live.com.
Timing Is Everything
For the sake of argument, Vista has been released two times to the public. First time was November 30th 2006 to the corporate crowd, second time being January 30th 2007. I bolded these dates because I want you to remember them as you look these graphs over;
First graph here is regarding Daily Reach according to Alexa.com. I circled the release date windows.
Conclusion: Corporate customers don’t care for Live.com as much as the home consumer does. The 2nd release shows a quick jump upwards in numbers due to a surge in sales for Vista.
Next graph gives you a look into Pageview numbers.
Conclusion: Again, same kind of scenario as previously, spikes on both graphs correlate & make sense. Notice how recently in the last 2-3 weeks their pageviews are going on a serious climb?
Now here’s where things get really interesting. So interesting that I even had to notate on the graph how puzzled I was when I saw it…
Conclusion: Either Alexa had a brain fart on this or we’re possibly seeing a surge in new Vista systems connecting to Live.com from within the OS itself instead of Internet Exploder Explorer 7. Vista’s built in Search does query Live.com for any of it’s online search needs if the user chooses it. Alexa has no way to track that.
Whatever has happened, it sure does look like the last month has been a good one for Live.com. Vista has pumped out 40 million units sold since the January release and shows no sign of slowing. Hand in hand they go, more Vista sales, more Live.com usage. I think the Microsoft Search Team owes the Vista Development team a beer or two.
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May 18th, 2007 at 5:52 am
I’m not sure if your interpretations are the only ones possible.
The Alexa numbers are regarded highly unreliable. As far as I know they stem from users of the Alexa Toolbar extension for your browser. However, I guess a good number of people getting a new computer will not remember that they need to install this toolbar. So naturally their user numbers should drop with such upgrading.
It is also a quite skewed universe of people loving the Alexa Toolbar. I know corporations that banned the toolbar and/or do filter it’s information o not reach Alexa’s server for security reasons.
Thirdly, I can hardly see the alleged bumps in the graphs. However I see on your last sample graph a highly suspicious flattening of a curve that was choppy before. This indicates for me some loss of data. If you extrapolate the trend line of the choppy curve, you end up roughly in the spot, where it jumps on the right. The upward trend is to be hoped for, as Microsoft spends lots of advertising money to promote live.com search and otherwise. Hopefully that has a return in investment.
Also you are watching a ranking trend upwards, which does not really say much about a single site. It is all dependent on what the other sites do. And Alexa’s notion of a site, which is all properties of a domain including all its sub domains, could simply mean live.com has some increasingly popular sub-domains, such as maps.live.com. Alexa is incapable to separate search.live.com from any other *.live.com.
So for me there is no event to see here. The graphs are at best inconclusive.
K<o>
Busy, supporting non technical users of OpenOffice
May 18th, 2007 at 7:28 am
Thanks Conficio,
Suspicion at best is whats happening here. I have 2 friends that work up in Redmond for MS, one is on the product development team and the other is on the Windows CE dev team. I doubt I’ll be successful, but I’ve been trying to pry some info out of them about this very topic, but don’t think I’ll get too far.
Believe me, I’m not a fan of Alexa. They’re toolbar registers as malware with Spybot and Adaware, also ironically enough, they bailed out of getting data supplied to them from Google and have since opted to use MSN. Alexa lost credibility, but I just can’t find an alternative for this kind of data. If you got a suggestion, I’ll take it.
By the way, checked out your site. Very cool, I will need to dig through it more later.