LiveSide, an independent site that tracks all things Microsoft Live, says: Microsoft takes control of Kumo.com domain – watch out for the Live Search rebrand. It's not sure whether Microsoft will run with Live Search or something else, but it has noticed that Kumo now points to Live Search. LiveSide says:
While Microsoft employees have admitted publicly that there are branding issues around Live Search, we're not quite ready to stick our heads above the parapet and say that Kumo will be the new brand name to be announced in a 2009 update.
Apparently, Kumo means "cloud" or "spider" in Japanese.
The naming and branding issues are being discussed on TechCrunch.
Live was brought in to provide a unifying brand for a group of services including Hotmail, Messenger and Spaces, in preference to using the old MSN (Microsoft Network) branding umbrella. Live Search is at least consistent, whereas Kumo doesn't fit with anything. It's hard to see the logic in that.
Of course, there's no reason why Microsoft shouldn't launch Kumo as well, using the same back end. Perhaps it could win market share in parts of Asia and South America, for example, where Google is less entrenched.
The question is whether Google's dominance is now so great that it's impervious to competition. In sum, if you build a better search engine, people still won't use it, no matter what you call it. And that's assuming Microsoft can build a better search engine, which it has so far failed to do.
