Did Microsoft Live Shopping Accomplish Anything?
Wonder whether Microsoft accomplished anything with their launch of Windows Live Shopping? Most of the community has attacked them for not supporting Firefox and for the poor use of AJAX.
But they do have an impressive database of products and merchants right? Not so, it seems. A little research on the site shows that Microsoft is continuing to simply serve up data from Pricegrabber and Shopzilla, albeit with a fancier front end. Couldn’t they at least build a shopping engine with their own advertisers?
Hopefully the next company to launch a comparision engine will come up with something more innovative.
May 3rd, 2006 at 2:41 pm
[…] We’ve started blogging at work. We’re starting a number of conversations about some topics that we think are broken with the current shopping engines and with some of the advertising models in general. The recent snafu that is Microsoft’s Live Shopping site certainly makes some points very easy, but we promise not to always sit around and shoot fish in a barrel. We’ll be releasing a public beta in June. Between now and then all of my efforts, and the whole company’s efforts, are focused on this mad scramble. […]
May 18th, 2006 at 3:39 pm
Not true that Live Shopping shows only items from Pricegrabber and Shopzilla. Their database includes millions of items via direct feeds from other merchants, as more than “a little” research would have shown. You’re entitled to your opinion on everything else
May 18th, 2006 at 5:17 pm
Thanks very much for pointing this out. Great to see that you launched another live shopping version that has crawled data as well. Very cool!