My Own Pirate Radio

A year and a half after launching their new search engine, Microsoft’s US market share in web search has declined from 13% to 9%, while Google and Yahoo! both gained. Microsoft is treading water while the market overall has grown. Here are the share numbers.

Yesterday brought more bad news for the Windows Live Search team: VP Christopher Payne is leaving Microsoft to start his own company.

It’s hard to imagine how to spin this one positively. Christopher was one of the first to pitch Bill and Steve on building a new search service in-house rather than continuing to outsource to Yahoo!. He played a huge role in recruiting key people to the team, creating a vision, and integrating marketing, business and customer focus into what was undoubtedly a pure engineering team. And as you can imagine, his business performance goals were tied in no small part to gains in market share and profitability. So this is not just the departure of the chief cheerleader and visionary; it’s a sign that success in search is not coming nearly as fast as Microsoft had hoped.

Having been on the team myself I have mixed feelings about this changing of the guard, and I imagine many of the people I used to work with are feeling the same way. When a key leader heads for the door you stop and question what keeps you there. Is it your passion for the technology and business challenges? Your allegiance to the company, the leaders, the team you helped build? The paycheck? How does that stack up against the negatives of the job? (Unless things have changed radically, the main down sides were: unattainable performance expectations pushed down from above, grueling hours, and a maddening culture of prima donna behavior that was tolerated and even rewarded.) Most importantly, how does all that measure up against time you could be spending doing something else? It’s worth doing that math once in a while.

Of course, the search battle is not over. In fact, it’s barely begun. But it will continue to be uphill for Microsoft. From the Seattle PI, March 5: “You have to think that, with the heavy lifting behind it, Microsoft has got to be in a good position to execute, and execute well,” Nielsen NetRatings’ Cassar said. “But they’re competing against two of the strongest companies, between Yahoo and Google, and so Microsoft can’t just execute well. Microsoft needs to execute in an extraordinary fashion in order to just keep pace.”

Good luck to all the warriors.

update March 8: Danny Sullivan gives some history on search at Microsoft.