🪟 Microsoft's Window Just Opening?
Microsoft is betting big on OpenAI, thanks to ChatGPT. $10 billion big. It could be a 2-for-1 approach to supercharge The Former Windows Company’s future as a cloud computing and AI-powered software and services provider with dashes of AI in anything they can add it to (Bing, Office, Azure, etc). (ChatGPT runs on Microsoft servers, 🎶the circle of life 🎵)
About that AI-powered future, Microsoft’s new VALL-E model can reliably generate audio that sounds like someone using only 3 seconds of source audio. The podcast and indie cartoon explosion cometh? (We’re getting closer to Ron Jeremy’s future.)
But it's more than just AI. It looks like King 'Softie is getting serious about shopping. BigCommerce sellers can now integrate their store with Merchant Center to deliver ads and listings across Bing, Edge, partners like Yahoo! and AOL, and more.
But that's just the amuse-bouche of their aspirations. It's adding features to its PromoteIQ platform to take it omnichannel: onsite, offsite, and in-store. The big play in onsite is the newly announced Microsoft Retail Advertising Network. Now retailers don't have to roll-their-own solution to become a retail media revenue generator, they can just tap Microsoft (and soon a bunch of AI-powered features, presumably).
Does all this have you wondering if you should consider Microsoft Ads (if you aren't running them already)? A good rule of thumb (according to Marketing Max) is:
If you spend more than $15,000 a month on Google ads, you should consider a small test investment in Bing ads.
The logic being (I'm guessing here), if Bing generates 900 million searches a day and Microsoft ads deliver on other search engines (like DuckDuckGo) and a test budget is 10% of spend, would you get more from tossing another $1,500 on your existing Google spend or putting it on a new channel with a (potentially) new audience? Plus, you can import your Google campaigns to Microsoft with a few clicks, so where's the downside of testing?
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It's not outlandish to think that Microsoft has forgotten more about enterprise sales and partnerships than Google knows about them. And with its history and track record in the field it has IBM status, no one gets fired for choosing Microsoft.
Moderately Hot Take?
Of the tech giants, it is the one that most closely resembles a decentralized or federated structure, which could become very handy in this evolving landscape of privacy and sentiment. It used to just build software that got installed on devices owned and operated by others. You didn't have to visit one URL to use its products. You didn't have to buy a piece of hardware it controlled the manufacturing process for. And now (I haven't checked earnings reports so this could be dead wrong) it doesn’t live or die by ad revenue or device sales or consumers clicking on a buy button. And if a bunch of Fortune 500 companies stop paying for it or start going out of business we probably have much bigger things to worry about then if Microsoft can survive.
This past meets present ambitions in this bit from the BigCommerce announcement:
Without leaving the BigCommerce Control Panel, merchants can see campaign performance with a snapshot view or run detailed reporting on a wide or granular scope, with specific key elements or side-by-side comparisons across various ad campaigns. Changes can be made in real time to status, budgets and bids while having access to a personalized tips dashboard and customer support to get better results.
Microsoft doesn't care about getting you back to a platform or page it controls to do what you want, it just wants you to use its stuff wherever is "convenient" for you.
All of these threads braided together with LinkedIn's growth gives Microsoft an intriguing foundation as Google's appears shaky.