Mymotech

I wanted to quickly jot down some quick notes about Gatineau, Microsoft’s new web analytics tool, that is in pre-alpa.

I think we all know that Microsoft is doing this to follow in Google’s footsteps to provide a tool that will encourage advertisers to spend more money on their respective ad delivery systems. Unfortunately for Microsoft, since Google thought of it first they bought a better company than what was available to Microsoft. Urchin was purchased by Google and DeepMetrix was purchased by Microsoft. In my opinion Urchin was a stronger performer in the analytics space than DeepMetrix. My experience with both tools pre-acquisition is not terribly strong so this is more my perception than a well researched fact.
Also, one has to question whether Microsoft is doing a little too much “me too” when it comes to business innovation in the search space. This is something they used to great affect when launching IE, but I wonder if this method of taking over the world has become slightly antiquated. We will see, I am sure.

Microsoft has brought on Ian Thomas, one of the founders of Web Abacus, to drive the development of the Microsoft version of this tool. In my mind they will need to produce a better look and feel for the tool to make it worth adopting.

On the flip side Microsoft has a long history of entering the market slowly and crappily but eventually dominating the space. They will potentially be able to integrate some very rich demographic data into the analytics reports. I think that this is unlikely in release one. And even though they have lost some market share in the search space, they will slowly get better and better and their AdCenter product will slowly start gaining traction, especially since Google is making their AdWords product more and more complex and harder to enter for a small business.

The great news in all of this is that we will see even more attention paid to web analysis and metrics based decisioning in online business. That will be a big victory for everyone.

Obviously, I am hoping to get my hands on an early version of this tool to put it through its paces.