Hardball competitive marketing: Microsoft offers enterprise credits to ditch Google and Yahoo

John Battelle, author of The Search, has PowerPoint slides describing Microsoft's enterprise marketing program to provide software credits to companies that configure their computers to use Microsoft Live Search and services. Varying degrees of credits are offered for differing amounts of commmitment by the enterprise, ranging up to the maximum compensation for removing all toolbars and encouraging emails from the CEO to drive compliance. Oh, and use of Internet Explorer 7 is mandatory.

Hmmm. Wasn't there a similar program designed to get companies to use Internet Explorer when Netscape was gaining market share? Next thing you'll know, we'll hear assertions that Microsoft Live Search is built into Windows and despite the efforts of thousands of Microsoft programmers, can't be removed.

Our take: We have to agree with Batelle's assertion that this could work in organizations that are already all Microsoft; it's straight out of the same playbook Microsoft uses with hardware OEMs. All we can say is that if Microsoft spent nearly as much attention and money on marketing programs to develop customer value as it did on killing competing companies, it would be making a lot more money.

Technorati Tags: Co-marketing, Incentives, Marketing, Microsoft, Netscape, The Search