This article is a great snapshot of a piece of IT history. Knowing that Yahoo almost bought Google in 2002, today I'm glad the deal never went through.
The merger surely would have been a boondoggle. I imagine the big beneficiary of that would have been Microsoft - if they managed to get their own act together.
The article is right that this came down to execution.
I remember managing ad campaigns (around 2005-2006) on AdWords, Overture and (starting at that time) MS AdCenter. AdWords was just great to use compared to the other two. With AdWords it's relatively easy to manually or automatically manage a campaign of 30,000 keywords and hundreds or thousands of adverts. Overture's UI was simply painful even for a handful of adverts.
MS's offering as I remember required Windows or IE or something so we tended to avoid it altogether.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 12.3 ms ] threadI guess I subscribed to the often told story that Google invented "text ads for search keywords".
I remember managing ad campaigns (around 2005-2006) on AdWords, Overture and (starting at that time) MS AdCenter. AdWords was just great to use compared to the other two. With AdWords it's relatively easy to manually or automatically manage a campaign of 30,000 keywords and hundreds or thousands of adverts. Overture's UI was simply painful even for a handful of adverts.
MS's offering as I remember required Windows or IE or something so we tended to avoid it altogether.