Microsoft strikes deals for Live Search

LAS VEGAS—Microsoft is hoping two new distribution deals will give its Live Search a much-needed boost.
The company is announcing on Wednesday a global deal with Dell that will see Live Search be the default search engine and a Windows Live toolbar bundled on the bulk of consumer and small-business PCs sold by the computer maker over the next three years. That deal is in addition to a five-year deal with Verizon Wireless, which leaked out earlier on Wednesday.

http://ces.cnet.com/8301-19167_1-10135067-100.html

If this is how they think, expect MSFT to buy Palm.

Verizon has done it again. They have rejected Google and chosen MS as their mobile search partner for what the article above said was $650 million. In the articles I read Verizon is critizised for rejecting the exclusive on the iPhone a couple years back. Now this. Well it’s a big market, someone’s got to be #2 or #3.

Interesting thoughts on the Pre from Daneil Eran Dilger

  Roughly Drafted Magazine

Palm impressed CES attendees this year with the unveiling of a new smartphone OS and prototype hardware called the Palm Pre. Given the low expectations set for the firm, the demos drew applause. But why?
Imagine a company announcing a new smartphone that blew away the current state of the art and ushered in a totally revamped user interface with intuitive touch control. That would merit applause. Now wait two years and duplicate the same demo, with missing functionality and lots of important details still unreleased, including the phone’s price. Why should this receive any applause at all, pity?

Palm simply showed up with a copycat iPhone interface two years late. But that isn’t the most egregiously lame part of the Pre’s introduction. Imagine now a different scenario: a new phone with a radical new approach to UI and mobile software is given an open, web standards-based SDK and developers are invited to write cool new applets for the device. Everyone groans and registers a wintery volley of discontent, complaining that without a native SDK, they’d rather develop for other platforms.

That of course was the iPhone in the fall of 2007, before Apple released its Cocoa-based development tools that allowed developers to write actual apps, not just Widget-like JavaScript applets.