Office 2007 Activation Key Microsoft's online plan

If you believe Microsoft;s been spending like crazy within the over the internet area, you ain;t seen absolutely nothing but. (And that;s not counting when or if Microsoft;s multi-billion-dollar bid for Yahoo;s search business is actually consummated.)Microsoft missed earnings projections when it announced its Q4 FY 2008 numbers on July 17. To some firm watchers; surprise, it wasn;t Windows Vista — which Microsoft claims to have sold 180 million licenses now — that was to blame. Instead, but again, it was Microsoft;s On the web Systems Organization (OSB), more than anything else, that dragged down the numbers.Nonetheless, Microsoft officials told Wall Street analysts not to expect Microsoft to change its OSB investing-for-the-longhaul strategy any time soon. Microsoft is planning to step up its on the net spending around driving usage of Live Search and growing its advertiser base for its adCenter online-ad platform.Chief Financial Officer Chris Lidell told Wall Streeters that “the additional investments of several hundreds of millions of dollars is worth the short-term cost, given the opportunity to participate in a market where the opportunity is measured inside the tens of billions of dollars.”Once it became clear that Microsoft wasn;t going to be buying Yahoo or — at least for the time being, even just its search unit — and that Yahoo would do a search-outsourcing deal with Google instead, Microsoft decided to “accelerate our on the web services’ organic growth strategy,” Liddell said. Specifically, according to a transcript of Microsoft;s earnings call:“(A)bout two-thirds of the incremental spend that we are planning is related to investments to drive usage of our lookup offering. We’re dialing up our lookup distribution initiatives with targeted OEM toolbar [alt] lookup deals, scaling lookup globally with investments in localized engineering and data centers, pursuing acquisitions and partnerships to build vertical content to support our commercial strategy, accelerating the rollout of our Cashback program, and increasing marketing within the business to grow awareness and drive traffic.“Second, we are upping the investments in our ad platform and increasing the number of advertisers and high quality inventory on that platform. Specifically,Office 2007 Activation Key, these investments are inside the area of accelerating the integration of our ad platform assets, expanding our sales and service capabilities, smaller acquisitions to enhance the platform technology, and investments in strategic partnerships to increase third-party inventory available to advertisers on our ad platform.”To be fair, it wasn;t just OSB that impacted Microsoft;s earnings per share. Microsoft claims to have sold more Xbox 360s than its guidance had reflected (resulting in greater cost of goods sold), as well as to have grown consulting and support revenues (both of which “carries higher associated costs than does software revenue”) more quickly within the quarter than planned.General Manager of Investor Relations Colleen Healy also told analysts yesterday that the lower profits also could be traced to being “able to bring servers in our data centers internet faster than expected and we invested in premium on line content, which is [higher creative and agency fees associated with it].” And then there were high headcount-growth, product development and new marketing campaigns also playing in, she claimed.Do you think Microsoft has no choice but to keep pouring money into OSB? Is there some point at which the Redmondians could/should give up trying to compete in consumer Web search and simply focus on other channels (like paid subscriptions for enterprise software/services) in the via the internet area?