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But MS had exactly the weakness I was talking about. If someone gives away their OS for free what will you do? Giving away advertising for free wont affect anything.

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Presumably they have a weakness. As you say, it's hard to quantify what they're doing, but that just means we don't have an easy way to figure it out. It still has statistics, limits and numbers, even if only their accountants have a good handle on what those are.

Well, in this case no one has a handle on the numbers yet. If you don't advertise at all and you have zero customers, then you advertise with google and get 100 customers, then the value is easily quantifiable. But it's never that cut and dry. How much value is e.g. HP getting from google?

If you can't know what the actual value of the service is, how can you make decisions about who is cheaper? Is bing cheaper? Maybe, but what about after you consider the vastly decreased exposure? How much does that matter?

I still think the only way to beat google today is to make a better search engine. Tomorrow that wont work either.

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