Move Along…Nothing to See Here

A few days ago I wrote about my early look at the new Microsoft Live Webmaster Tools beta. Microsoft has since removed the beta logo and officially launched the portal and associated forum for public use. Apparently the forum moderators are still passed out from the tryptophan because the same questions I had about the tool, “what do the little green boxes mean”, and “how in the world are you coming up with these indexed pages”, have both been left unanswered as of yet. Maybe Microsoft would have been better off following Google’s lead by leaving the beta suffix permanently attached to the tool so nobody could officially complain. It seems with Microsoft’s recent announcement about their search traffic goals that they would really want to put the best tools in the hands of those who power the internet - geeks. I recall reading an article about why Visual Studio has become so popular and why developers love to code for the Microsoft platform and it wasn’t because they had to work with substandard tools. Come on Ballmer, if you really want a juicier slice of the enormous advertising pie it is time to siphon some money off the bottom of the marketing budget and develop a razor sharp portal that will make Google users actually want to make the switch.