6 ms·

Admit It, Microsoft: You Suck at the Web

84 points by hshah 17y ago

aneesh 17y ago
Just because you suck at something doesn't mean you should automatically give up. I think it's to Microsoft's credit that they're continuing to go after search. And they're making progress with Bing, albeit very slowly. I don't see anyone else attacking Google in search.
- dotcoma 17y ago
  as said in the article, attacking Google in search is not going to get them anywhere. Facebook, or Apple, or Nokia (with its free GPS service on its smartphones) may steal a bit (or a lot, perhaps) of the show from Google, but I doubt Microsoft ever will.
  - Niten 17y ago
    But why? Really, is there any fundamental reason we should expect Google to remain perpetually on top of the search engine business? I think the difference in quality between Google and Bing search results is negligible; at this point it's just a matter of mindshare as to whether people, on average, go to www.google.com or to www.bing.com when they want to look something up. There's no vendor lock-in propping up Google, to the extent that there is behind the Windows or iTunes monopolies. Mindshare can be altered, Microsoft just needs to figure out how to do it.
    - Lazlo_Nibble 17y ago
      I don't expect Google to remain perpetually on top of the search engine business. But neither do I believe that Microsoft, as we know it today, is capable of being the company that knocks them down.
    - jimbokun 17y ago
      "But why? Really, is there any fundamental reason we should expect Google to remain perpetually on top of the search engine business?" In technology, it is rare that a leader loses it's place in the market. More often, a new technology is pioneered by a new company that makes the old technology less relevant. IBM never lost the mainframe market, but did not dominate the PC market. Google did not take over PCs, but dominates search. There are many more examples like this.
      - jussij 17y ago
        There was a company called AltaVista that once domminated web search. There was also a company called Novell that pretty much invented the business of networking PC's, but where are they now?
        lftl 17y ago
        While not explicit in the parent post, I think his major point was about a leader in a mature technology field not often being replaced. Google supplanted Altavista largely because they made huge strides in a rather new field. While it's definitely possible, it's a little hard to image someone coming along with a web search that's impressive enough to supplant Google. It's more likely that "search" would evolve into something not entirely comparable to today's search, and replace them.
    - dotcoma 17y ago
      For starters, Google mints its own money via Adwords, while Microsoft still depends on Yahoo Overture, which Yahoo itself (and everybody else in the industry) acknowledged being greatly inferior to Adwords, to the point that they wanted to use Adwords to make more money out of the Long Tail of search...
- scrrr 17y ago
  For quality search results theres also still http://www.ask.com http://www.ask.com and http://www.alltheweb.com http://www.alltheweb.com . I wonder why we hear so little about those.
  - krakensden 17y ago
    I've been let down by Ask so many times over so many years (... more than 10?), I do not even think about them.
  - wgj 17y ago
    On ask.com I have to scroll the page to even reach the first organic result after the block of sponsored results. If you use it on a regular basis, don't you get tired of doing that?
  - jbrennan 17y ago
    Don't ask.
- brandonkm 17y ago
  I agree. Around 2000, I remember reading all these articles in video game magazines talking about how microsoft will never be a major player in consoles. "Microsoft is not a video game company, its not in their dna". Fast forward a bit and look at the console landscape now. 5.5 million xbox 360s were sold in the 4th quarter of 2009. The xbox can now be considered a runaway success, despite the numerous setbacks that have occured (red ring of death). With search the landscape is a bit different, but we shouldn't be so shortsighted as to count microsoft out of the game or think that bing will never gain >50% marketshare. We could look at articles like this in 3-4 years and laugh out how off the mark it was, just like the articles in game magazines bashing the xbox in the early 2000's.
  - absconditus 17y ago
    Has the Xbox division been profitable over its lifetime? I realize that they are supposedly profitable now, but have their recent profits exceeded the previous losses yet?
    - jordyhoyt 17y ago
      Immediately profitable <> successful. They're pushing console gaming to the next level, and you can bet that their next iteration will be wildly popular. Turning a huge profit at the expense of not providing significant value is how to remove yourself from future competition.
      - mattmanser 17y ago
        you can bet that their next iteration will be wildly popular No, you really can't. Look at PS3 compared to PS2, GameCube versus nintendo 64, Saturn versus megadrive. In fact it's practically an industry rule that you always fail after a successful generation of console! A betting man would reckon on the Xbox 3 being a flop.
        msc 17y ago
        I wouldn't bet on it being a flop. In my opinion, the only unsuccessful Nintendo console was GameCube. NES, SNES, N64, Wii, all a success. PS1 was a success, so was PS2. I'm not really convinced of this industry rule you're talking about. Wii reached an audience no console ever reached, thanks to the titles and controllers. I'm betting Project Natal will take over a big slice of that market, unless Nintendo really steps it up.
- rabidgnat 17y ago
  On the other hand, do big companies ever get BETTER at something? Large companies tend to walk off their own skyscrapers. Microsoft toppled IBM with the "PC on every desk" mantra. In turn, Microsoft never won on the Internet, because they just never understood that humans network. Phone+cable+Internet companies are begging for a sassy upstart to eat their lunch when competition opens up. American car companies missed game-changing trends in consumer automobiles towards fuel efficiency. Should Microsoft abandon search? Probably not, but they're more likely to make money if they attack markets that only have awful products. Attacking a market with strong loyalties and gold-standard type products seems like a fool's errand
bobbyi 17y ago
> Mabye it’s time the company sold off its online division to a company that is just that – like Yahoo. I don't think Microsoft could find a buyer for its online division.
awa 17y ago
According to the graph in the article they actually made profit in 2004 and 2005 and only a small loss in 06.. I'll admit some of the web products suck (hotmail?) but not bing, they haven't been able to profit from it. I guess currently they are after marketshare rather than profits. Think of it like a startup burning through some initial VC money to get customers except that they have a lot of money to burn! Disclaimer: They pay my bills, but am not really a fanboy just not anti-microsoft.
- kalid 17y ago
  7 billion is quite a bit of VC money :).
- dangrossman 17y ago
  Hotmail is the second most popular e-mail service on the web, second only to Yahoo! Mail.
  - cakesy 17y ago
    Yes, but it still sucks. It is just hard to move your email address, and lots of people don't know any better. Anyone with any sense, and not many friends has already gone.
  - cakesy 17y ago
    Yes, but it still sucks. It is just hard to move your email address, and lots of people don't know any better. Anyone with any sense, and not many friends has already gone.
  - awa 17y ago
    Popularity of a product is not a true sign of "not sucking" :P
scrrr 17y ago
Microsoft always seems to need one or two attempts before they make a really good product. Win95 -> WinME -> WinXP. Zune -> Zune2. Vista -> 7. They may not be as agile as Google, but a lot of smart people work at MS. I hope they succeed with good search. Google needs some competition. Having said that: Bing sucks b*s in Germany.
- thristian 17y ago
  So far as I know, the rule was always "don't bother buying any MS software until version 3". MS-DOS: v1.0, v2.0, v3.3 Windows: v1.0, v2.0, v3.0 Windows NT: v3.1, v3.51, v4.0 Word for Windows: v1.0, v2.0, v6.0 Visual Basic: v1.0, v2.0, v3.0 There's probably other examples, but I'm not sufficiently familiar with Microsoft's other (or newer) products to list them.
  - mbreese 17y ago
    I thought it was never buy a x.0 MS product. And in the case of XP, etc... it was wait until the first service pack.
- city41 17y ago
  Pretty much everyone I met at Microsoft was very smart. But at least within my division, the available energy was never utilized very effectively. I always compared it to a muscle car, sure that V8 has a lot of power, but boy that car can't handle for anything. With that said, you just can't apply blanket statements to the company. "Microsoft isn't good at the web" just doesn't really mean anything. The Bing team is for all intents and purposes, a completely different company from the IE team, from the Xbox and Zune teams from DevDiv... How a given team at MS does largely depends on how effective its management is. Some teams have really effective managers, PMs, and developers that can execute. Others don't. There is very little (almost none) energy, process or direction that gets applied across the entire company.
  - fauigerzigerk 17y ago
    "[...] the available energy was never utilized very effectively" Doesn't that apply to all big corporations to some degree? I think it's a tradeoff between using each individual's potential and utilizing economies of scale. The latter requires coordination of many people, which reduces the leeway for all individuals involved. Corporate culture is certainly important, but no corporate culture can completely overcome the limitations imposed by utilizing size. At least that's what the ad-hoc scientist in my head says, you know, the one that never reveals any sources ;-)
metatronscube 17y ago
Not the only thing I would say that they "suck at".
benologist 17y ago
You could make the same argument about almost everything Google's done except for search/advertising/youtube.
- city41 17y ago
  And they didn't really "do" youtube, they bought it. The core of the service has remained exactly the same since when it debuted.
  - Herring 17y ago
    So what? Microsoft can make & has made acquisitions too. It's not Google's fault that MS is bad at that too.
    - benologist 17y ago
      My point is simply that you can't generalize and say MS sucks at web because they've had no success at search - they have multiple platforms that are or are close to market leaders, just not search. Can you imagine anyone writing about how Google should just admit they suck at web because they (also) only have a few actually-significant properties on the web? There's 3 MS and 5 Google properties on this page of the top 20 web properties according to Alexa - http://www.alexa.com/topsites http://www.alexa.com/topsites Neither sucks at web as a whole. But MS sucks at trying to dislodge Google from search and Google sucks at being anything but search (and YouTube, which was already massively successful when they bought it).
      - tybris 17y ago
        YouTube isn't exactly a success either. It's unlikely they'll ever have a positive return on their investment.
        nfriedly 17y ago
        I disagree with you there, I expect youtube to be profitable at some point. I don't think Google spent that much money on mindshare alone.
pvg 17y ago
You know what also sucks at the web? Blog posts with a pointless blurry 330 kilobyte PNG at the top.
raganwald 17y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude ?
- Batsu 17y ago
  I can't help but wonder if we could derive a whole new term specified to Microsoft.
gruseom 17y ago
Bit of a baity article insofar as MS can't "admit" they suck at the web and it would be suicide if they gave up on it. I have a question regarding Bing, though. A while back, someone here made a suggestion that struck me as brilliant: that Bing provide an option to exclude web pages with Adsense ads on them from search results. This would get rid of untold jungles of webspam and deprive Google of revenue at the same time. Of course it would also exclude many legitimate pages, but webspam has turned into such a horrible problem that at this point I just don't care (especially if the filter were an option I could turn on and off). If MS did this, I would use Bing regularly. I can't think of any other reason to say that. My question is: what besides accusations of anti-competitive behavior (which strike me as rather weak in this case, MS being far from the monopolist in search) would prevent MS from trying this?
- epochwolf 17y ago
  I think too much of the web has Adsense on it for that to be a good idea.
  - gruseom 17y ago
    Yes, but pages with Adsense ads on them are of poorer average quality (I'm guessing) because there is so much spam. Google have an obvious conflict of interest preventing them from doing much about this. That conflict of interest is just about my only real grievance with Google; I'm otherwise a happy Google user with no incentive to switch. Why wouldn't MS exploit this? The suggestion isn't that they suppress Adsense pages altogether, just provide an option to filter them out.
akamaka 17y ago
Why does everyone forget about Messenger? With about the same number of users as Facebook, it's hardly a failure.
- epochwolf 17y ago
  Does messenger actually make Microsoft any money? I have an MSN Messenger account but I never use their client for it. I've always used 3rd party applications.
johnrob 17y ago
"Does Microsoft not realize that all the spoils of the mobile web are going to the companies that control the front-end interface — that is, the big mobile OS players like Android and iPhone and not the fringe players like Windows Mobile?" Sounds like what folks said about desktops in the late 90s. History tells us that the device/PC ends up simply being a way to access the web. Sure, there are always some intensive apps that require the local cpu, but those are rarely for the mass market.
dondemarco 17y ago
If you want to go that far back let's be fair. How about IE? Didn't they come from nowhere to dethrone netscape and capture ~90% of the market when all the talking heads on Wall street had written them off for lacking a "compelling internet strategy"?
fauigerzigerk 17y ago
Ok, but who, other than Google, does actually make a lot of money on the web? Yahoo is struggling and most of what they offer is generic crap monetizing their old brand. I have no idea whether Facebook makes any money. It can't be easy judging by their desperate attempts to trick users into doing things that are bad for them. Twitter should make tons of money considering their service is trivial (I know it's not trivial to operate at that scale) and their mindshare huge. But how much money do they make? Content creators like journalists, authors or musicians find it very difficult to make money as well. Amazon does make money, but they are a retailer, not a web company I would say. In my view, it's an open question whether the ad funded web is a viable business model for a lot of companies or just a niche in which very very few big players make all the money.

84 points by hshah 17y ago

Just because you suck at something doesn't mean you should automatically give up. I think it's to Microsoft's credit that they're continuing to go after search. And they're making progress with Bing, albeit very slowly. I don't see anyone else attacking Google in search.

dotcoma 17y ago
as said in the article, attacking Google in search is not going to get them anywhere. Facebook, or Apple, or Nokia (with its free GPS service on its smartphones) may steal a bit (or a lot, perhaps) of the show from Google, but I doubt Microsoft ever will.
- Niten 17y ago
  But why? Really, is there any fundamental reason we should expect Google to remain perpetually on top of the search engine business? I think the difference in quality between Google and Bing search results is negligible; at this point it's just a matter of mindshare as to whether people, on average, go to www.google.com or to www.bing.com when they want to look something up. There's no vendor lock-in propping up Google, to the extent that there is behind the Windows or iTunes monopolies. Mindshare can be altered, Microsoft just needs to figure out how to do it.
  - Lazlo_Nibble 17y ago
    I don't expect Google to remain perpetually on top of the search engine business. But neither do I believe that Microsoft, as we know it today, is capable of being the company that knocks them down.
  - jimbokun 17y ago
    "But why? Really, is there any fundamental reason we should expect Google to remain perpetually on top of the search engine business?" In technology, it is rare that a leader loses it's place in the market. More often, a new technology is pioneered by a new company that makes the old technology less relevant. IBM never lost the mainframe market, but did not dominate the PC market. Google did not take over PCs, but dominates search. There are many more examples like this.
    - jussij 17y ago
      There was a company called AltaVista that once domminated web search. There was also a company called Novell that pretty much invented the business of networking PC's, but where are they now?
      - lftl 17y ago
        While not explicit in the parent post, I think his major point was about a leader in a mature technology field not often being replaced. Google supplanted Altavista largely because they made huge strides in a rather new field. While it's definitely possible, it's a little hard to image someone coming along with a web search that's impressive enough to supplant Google. It's more likely that "search" would evolve into something not entirely comparable to today's search, and replace them.
  - dotcoma 17y ago
    For starters, Google mints its own money via Adwords, while Microsoft still depends on Yahoo Overture, which Yahoo itself (and everybody else in the industry) acknowledged being greatly inferior to Adwords, to the point that they wanted to use Adwords to make more money out of the Long Tail of search...
scrrr 17y ago
For quality search results theres also still http://www.ask.com http://www.ask.com and http://www.alltheweb.com http://www.alltheweb.com . I wonder why we hear so little about those.
- krakensden 17y ago
  I've been let down by Ask so many times over so many years (... more than 10?), I do not even think about them.
- wgj 17y ago
  On ask.com I have to scroll the page to even reach the first organic result after the block of sponsored results. If you use it on a regular basis, don't you get tired of doing that?
- jbrennan 17y ago
  Don't ask.
brandonkm 17y ago
I agree. Around 2000, I remember reading all these articles in video game magazines talking about how microsoft will never be a major player in consoles. "Microsoft is not a video game company, its not in their dna". Fast forward a bit and look at the console landscape now. 5.5 million xbox 360s were sold in the 4th quarter of 2009. The xbox can now be considered a runaway success, despite the numerous setbacks that have occured (red ring of death). With search the landscape is a bit different, but we shouldn't be so shortsighted as to count microsoft out of the game or think that bing will never gain >50% marketshare. We could look at articles like this in 3-4 years and laugh out how off the mark it was, just like the articles in game magazines bashing the xbox in the early 2000's.
- absconditus 17y ago
  Has the Xbox division been profitable over its lifetime? I realize that they are supposedly profitable now, but have their recent profits exceeded the previous losses yet?
  - jordyhoyt 17y ago
    Immediately profitable <> successful. They're pushing console gaming to the next level, and you can bet that their next iteration will be wildly popular. Turning a huge profit at the expense of not providing significant value is how to remove yourself from future competition.
    - mattmanser 17y ago
      you can bet that their next iteration will be wildly popular No, you really can't. Look at PS3 compared to PS2, GameCube versus nintendo 64, Saturn versus megadrive. In fact it's practically an industry rule that you always fail after a successful generation of console! A betting man would reckon on the Xbox 3 being a flop.
      - msc 17y ago
        I wouldn't bet on it being a flop. In my opinion, the only unsuccessful Nintendo console was GameCube. NES, SNES, N64, Wii, all a success. PS1 was a success, so was PS2. I'm not really convinced of this industry rule you're talking about. Wii reached an audience no console ever reached, thanks to the titles and controllers. I'm betting Project Natal will take over a big slice of that market, unless Nintendo really steps it up.
rabidgnat 17y ago
On the other hand, do big companies ever get BETTER at something? Large companies tend to walk off their own skyscrapers. Microsoft toppled IBM with the "PC on every desk" mantra. In turn, Microsoft never won on the Internet, because they just never understood that humans network. Phone+cable+Internet companies are begging for a sassy upstart to eat their lunch when competition opens up. American car companies missed game-changing trends in consumer automobiles towards fuel efficiency. Should Microsoft abandon search? Probably not, but they're more likely to make money if they attack markets that only have awful products. Attacking a market with strong loyalties and gold-standard type products seems like a fool's errand

bobbyi 17y ago

> Mabye it’s time the company sold off its online division to a company that is just that – like Yahoo. I don't think Microsoft could find a buyer for its online division.

awa 17y ago

According to the graph in the article they actually made profit in 2004 and 2005 and only a small loss in 06.. I'll admit some of the web products suck (hotmail?) but not bing, they haven't been able to profit from it. I guess currently they are after marketshare rather than profits. Think of it like a startup burning through some initial VC money to get customers except that they have a lot of money to burn! Disclaimer: They pay my bills, but am not really a fanboy just not anti-microsoft.

kalid 17y ago
7 billion is quite a bit of VC money :).
dangrossman 17y ago
Hotmail is the second most popular e-mail service on the web, second only to Yahoo! Mail.
- cakesy 17y ago
  Yes, but it still sucks. It is just hard to move your email address, and lots of people don't know any better. Anyone with any sense, and not many friends has already gone.
- cakesy 17y ago
  Yes, but it still sucks. It is just hard to move your email address, and lots of people don't know any better. Anyone with any sense, and not many friends has already gone.
- awa 17y ago
  Popularity of a product is not a true sign of "not sucking" :P

scrrr 17y ago

Microsoft always seems to need one or two attempts before they make a really good product. Win95 -> WinME -> WinXP. Zune -> Zune2. Vista -> 7. They may not be as agile as Google, but a lot of smart people work at MS. I hope they succeed with good search. Google needs some competition. Having said that: Bing sucks b*s in Germany.

thristian 17y ago
So far as I know, the rule was always "don't bother buying any MS software until version 3". MS-DOS: v1.0, v2.0, v3.3 Windows: v1.0, v2.0, v3.0 Windows NT: v3.1, v3.51, v4.0 Word for Windows: v1.0, v2.0, v6.0 Visual Basic: v1.0, v2.0, v3.0 There's probably other examples, but I'm not sufficiently familiar with Microsoft's other (or newer) products to list them.
- mbreese 17y ago
  I thought it was never buy a x.0 MS product. And in the case of XP, etc... it was wait until the first service pack.
city41 17y ago
Pretty much everyone I met at Microsoft was very smart. But at least within my division, the available energy was never utilized very effectively. I always compared it to a muscle car, sure that V8 has a lot of power, but boy that car can't handle for anything. With that said, you just can't apply blanket statements to the company. "Microsoft isn't good at the web" just doesn't really mean anything. The Bing team is for all intents and purposes, a completely different company from the IE team, from the Xbox and Zune teams from DevDiv... How a given team at MS does largely depends on how effective its management is. Some teams have really effective managers, PMs, and developers that can execute. Others don't. There is very little (almost none) energy, process or direction that gets applied across the entire company.
- fauigerzigerk 17y ago
  "[...] the available energy was never utilized very effectively" Doesn't that apply to all big corporations to some degree? I think it's a tradeoff between using each individual's potential and utilizing economies of scale. The latter requires coordination of many people, which reduces the leeway for all individuals involved. Corporate culture is certainly important, but no corporate culture can completely overcome the limitations imposed by utilizing size. At least that's what the ad-hoc scientist in my head says, you know, the one that never reveals any sources ;-)

metatronscube 17y ago

Not the only thing I would say that they "suck at".

benologist 17y ago

You could make the same argument about almost everything Google's done except for search/advertising/youtube.

city41 17y ago
And they didn't really "do" youtube, they bought it. The core of the service has remained exactly the same since when it debuted.
- Herring 17y ago
  So what? Microsoft can make & has made acquisitions too. It's not Google's fault that MS is bad at that too.
  - benologist 17y ago
    My point is simply that you can't generalize and say MS sucks at web because they've had no success at search - they have multiple platforms that are or are close to market leaders, just not search. Can you imagine anyone writing about how Google should just admit they suck at web because they (also) only have a few actually-significant properties on the web? There's 3 MS and 5 Google properties on this page of the top 20 web properties according to Alexa - http://www.alexa.com/topsites http://www.alexa.com/topsites Neither sucks at web as a whole. But MS sucks at trying to dislodge Google from search and Google sucks at being anything but search (and YouTube, which was already massively successful when they bought it).
    - tybris 17y ago
      YouTube isn't exactly a success either. It's unlikely they'll ever have a positive return on their investment.
      - nfriedly 17y ago
        I disagree with you there, I expect youtube to be profitable at some point. I don't think Google spent that much money on mindshare alone.

pvg 17y ago

You know what also sucks at the web? Blog posts with a pointless blurry 330 kilobyte PNG at the top.

raganwald 17y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude ?

Batsu 17y ago
I can't help but wonder if we could derive a whole new term specified to Microsoft.

gruseom 17y ago

Bit of a baity article insofar as MS can't "admit" they suck at the web and it would be suicide if they gave up on it. I have a question regarding Bing, though. A while back, someone here made a suggestion that struck me as brilliant: that Bing provide an option to exclude web pages with Adsense ads on them from search results. This would get rid of untold jungles of webspam and deprive Google of revenue at the same time. Of course it would also exclude many legitimate pages, but webspam has turned into such a horrible problem that at this point I just don't care (especially if the filter were an option I could turn on and off). If MS did this, I would use Bing regularly. I can't think of any other reason to say that. My question is: what besides accusations of anti-competitive behavior (which strike me as rather weak in this case, MS being far from the monopolist in search) would prevent MS from trying this?

epochwolf 17y ago
I think too much of the web has Adsense on it for that to be a good idea.
- gruseom 17y ago
  Yes, but pages with Adsense ads on them are of poorer average quality (I'm guessing) because there is so much spam. Google have an obvious conflict of interest preventing them from doing much about this. That conflict of interest is just about my only real grievance with Google; I'm otherwise a happy Google user with no incentive to switch. Why wouldn't MS exploit this? The suggestion isn't that they suppress Adsense pages altogether, just provide an option to filter them out.

akamaka 17y ago

Why does everyone forget about Messenger? With about the same number of users as Facebook, it's hardly a failure.

epochwolf 17y ago
Does messenger actually make Microsoft any money? I have an MSN Messenger account but I never use their client for it. I've always used 3rd party applications.

johnrob 17y ago

"Does Microsoft not realize that all the spoils of the mobile web are going to the companies that control the front-end interface — that is, the big mobile OS players like Android and iPhone and not the fringe players like Windows Mobile?" Sounds like what folks said about desktops in the late 90s. History tells us that the device/PC ends up simply being a way to access the web. Sure, there are always some intensive apps that require the local cpu, but those are rarely for the mass market.

dondemarco 17y ago

If you want to go that far back let's be fair. How about IE? Didn't they come from nowhere to dethrone netscape and capture ~90% of the market when all the talking heads on Wall street had written them off for lacking a "compelling internet strategy"?

fauigerzigerk 17y ago

Ok, but who, other than Google, does actually make a lot of money on the web? Yahoo is struggling and most of what they offer is generic crap monetizing their old brand. I have no idea whether Facebook makes any money. It can't be easy judging by their desperate attempts to trick users into doing things that are bad for them. Twitter should make tons of money considering their service is trivial (I know it's not trivial to operate at that scale) and their mindshare huge. But how much money do they make? Content creators like journalists, authors or musicians find it very difficult to make money as well. Amazon does make money, but they are a retailer, not a web company I would say. In my view, it's an open question whether the ad funded web is a viable business model for a lot of companies or just a niche in which very very few big players make all the money.