Microsoft's Experience With Online Advertising

Today's Wall Street Journal featured a story on Microsoft's long road to embracing online advertising. It followed the gradually rising fortunes of Joanne Bradford, whom the company hired in 2001, from McGraw-Hill, to head that effort. She is soon to be named to head the MSN online group, at just 43 years of age.

That's the basic news contained in the story. The sad part is why it took the company five years to accept Ms. Bradford's strategy and efforts to do the job for which Microsoft hired her. Particularly embarrassing for the company are the reported antics of a David Cole, now on leave from Microsoft, and her one-time manager.

The article reminds me of my years at ATT, where outsiders had to attempt to break through resident narrowmindedness as the telecommunications giant struggled to ready itself for deregulation. Countless middle- and senior-level executives were hired to do jobs which some even more senior ATT executives and officers did not even agree were necessary.

Such seems to have been the case for Joanne Bradford at Microsoft. Meanwhile, as the WSJ piece details, Google roared past the software giant and revolutionized the online advertising business.

In taking five years to finally come to a realization that online ads are important to its future, it makes me wonder if Microsoft has enough time to recover from its mistakes in this area.

And, now, rather than recruit an online business executive, they are simply promoting Ms. Bradford, their online advertising executive. Granted, she seems to have finally persevered and won acceptance of her function at the firm. Does this make her the best overall online business leader?

Personally, I'd think more of Microsoft if it expanded Ms. Bradford's advertising duties and objectives, while recruiting a senior online business executive for the MSN online group.

Blogger is misbehaving today, so I am unable to paste a chart comparing Microsoft's five year stock price with the S&P500. Suffice to say, the latter is up about 20%, and the former is still negative.

Reading stories like this one, about the company's inability to coordinate its hiring and funding of key areas such as online advertising, suggest to me that Microsoft will continue to stumble in its efforts to compete in non-software-based business areas for some time to come.