Microsoft is hoping to strike the Google goliath with some sort of David stone by making News Corp content invisible to Google searches. Fantastic.
Microsoft (maybe) plans to monetize search engine results by giving Rupert Murdoch money if he agrees to block News Corp content from Google search results. Microsoft’s plan seems pretty clever. Until you spend thirty seconds thinking about it a little more. Then, the logic is as fuzzy and backward as you would expect from Ballmer and Co.
If people like something, when they find something that makes them feel good, they flock to it. They use it or buy it, they love it, they enjoy it, they tell their friends. When the product or music or fashion or culture gets too popular, they go find or invent something else. Its pretty simple.
Real Hip-Hop culture today doesn’t look exactly like it did in the mid 80s and early 90s when it was the fucking coolest thing ever. But, today it also has nothing to do with Lil’ Wayne or the Stanky Legg dance. This cycle doesn’t have a name that I know of, but I’m cooking one up as I write this (and drink beer, two at least). While it may not have a name yet, it’s a concept that is a no brainer for those of us who spend any time with other people – which is why I’m starting to get the impression that most giant company CEOs must only hang out with each other and other aliens. Why else would they have to hire focus groups and marketing research firms? When you are dealing with something as widespread as the internet, all you have to do communicate with some human beings from time to time. What do they like to do? How do they think? These questions and more can be answered by hanging out with us. My point is especially true for old, fat white CEOs trying to discover what diverse groups of younger people want, buy, and flock to. As we get older, even the most righteously unique individuals settle into grooves and sort of roll, sink, and fall into groups rather than creating them – and the buzz and flockage that follows a nice spin-off sub-culture.
Microsoft, it seems, was busy dreaming up an inspired cock sucking contest with Mr. not-news himself while Google was inventing the Cloud. Awesome Microsoft, way to go.
If I was Microsoft’s father and Microsoft was a little league player, I wouldn’t know what to do right now. You can’t cheer your kid and praise his effort when he hits the ball deep into left field with a chance for an in-the park home run with the game tied in the bottom of the final inning when he turns around and starts running off the field down the street somewhere. I think I would start yelling, “What the fuck is that little moron doing?!” with all of the other bitter, angry, sports-failure dad’s.
What the fuck is that moron doing? And by moron, I mean Steve Ballmer. I’m so glad we have a free-trade capitalist economy like we do. It is set up perfectly to encourage the kind of creative, outside of the box thinking, Microsoft and News Corp plan on unleashing. Oh, wait. This is the same swindling, money-grubbing bumbbling that recently collapsed the auto industry. Ideas like this from enormous American companies are as short-sighted and backwards as they are lazy and predictable. For a moment there, after our financial and automotive industries came apart like a young Hollywood romance after three weeks, it looked like we were going to start innovating again. The joke’s on me. Well played Microsoft. Well played.
Steve Ballmer, is my nomination for “Dumbest Rich Guy of the Decade.” He is useless and the only good news for him is that if a live-action Simpsons show were ever in the works, he’d be first in line to play Homer Simpson.
Burns (played by James Gandolfini, after loosing 175 pounds and an Olsen twin as a result of a newly found love for mixing cocaine, meth, and epicat): “You nincompoop, whatever your name is -
Smithers (played by Timothy Geithner) interrupts to whisper: “- That’s Homer Simpson, Sir”
Burns continues: “Yes, Simpson, you idiot, you bungled another multi-billion dollar deal with Yahoo! You’re fired!”
Homer (played by that nincompoop Ballmer): “Doh!”
See, here’s the thing about the internet: It’s cool and fun and exciting and smart now, but it won’t always be. It became all of those things because people were sick of television, radio, newspapers, and books. The internet provided all of the beautiful innovation and inspiration other media weren’t*. Nothing stays the same for long, and the internet is no exception. The things that made T.V. (and its boring, lame buddies) old and stupid are taking hold in and on the internet. In some cases, the final result is sure to be much more harmful and stifling to creativity and fun and happiness. Advertising and a now free for all race to rape internet users for every squeezable penny will help destroy the popularity of the internet. Something cooler and awesomer and totally removed from “greedy corporations harshing our high” will come along and we’ll all flock to that. Each next thing after the internet will thrive, like the internet did, until the desperation to make a profit from it drives the money-spending masses to go somewhere else. The internet is already on the way out, and I know who killed it.
* Instead of innovating and using the internet’s successes as fuels for their fires, most members of traditional media industries, with few exceptions, have taken turns jumping on each other’s sinking ships. The norm is stealing, and usually ruining, mediocre and entirely un-original ideas. Do the geniuses at Microsoft really think people will use Bing more if they can’t search for News Corp content using Google?
Note: I used google to research this entire post and I don’t know why. Its painfully obvious that Microsoft doesn’t either.
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