HP Serves Yahoo With Pw0ner Move-In Eviction Notice
Valiantly soldiering on in its quest to buy the search market share it has been unable to attain on the strength of its own technology, Microsoft (MSFT) this morning announced an alliance with Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) that will give its Live Search service a very broad beachhead in the PC market.
The deal calls for a Silverlight-powered Live Search toolbar be installed on all HP consumer PCs shipping in the U.S. and Canada beginning in January. Come next year, Live Search, not Yahoo (ouch), will be the default search-engine setting in the browser on HP PCs. “This agreement with HP is a strategic indicator of our increased focus on securing broad-scale distribution for Live Search,”Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft’s Platforms & Services Division said in a statement. “This is the most significant distribution deal for Live Search that Microsoft has ever done.”
Microsoft wouldn’t say how much it’s paying HP for access to its vast customer base, but a similar deal between Google (GOOG) and Dell (DELL) was rumored to have cost the search sovereign nearly $1 billion over three year. Chances are Microsoft’s looking at fees around that order of magnitude with this HP deal. That said, now that the Yahoo (YHOO) acqusition has fallen through, the company’s got more money to spend on this sort of thing. Said Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, “Given the billions it was prepared to spend on acquiring Yahoo, I’d assume it’s willing to pay much more for distribution these days.”