Microsoft To Rebrand Search. Will It Be Kumo?

[dhilipkumar]

Microsoft To Rebrand Search. Will It Be Kumo?

Microsoft will relaunch Windows Live Search under a new brand sometime early next year, says a source within the company. What we don't know is what that new brand will be, although a few names have been thrown around. According to our source, a "final" decision has been made, but very few people inside of Microsoft are aware of it, and it could change.

Now LiveSide is saying there's evidence the new search brand will be Kumo, which means "cloud" or "spider" in Japanese.

Why would Microsoft go through yet another rebranding effort? Live.com has a lot of different services under its umbrella (some server software, some client software) in addition to search. It's also a burgeoning social network.

Over time, we've heard, Live.com will become a pure social network and personal productivity portal. You'll go there to access email, calendar, photos, activity streams, etc. But search belongs somewhere else, and it definitely needs a fresh start.

Microsoft won't comment on the name change, or even if there is a name change. But our sources caution us that nothing has been finalized, and the fate of Yahoo could swing this one way or another as well. So Kumo may very well be the name Microsoft is planning to use, but that decision may change.

[dhilipkumar]

Microsoft Acquires Kumo.com Fueling Rumors of Live Search Re-branding

It is rumored that Microsoft intends to re-brand its Live Search into Kumo next year. The company has allegedly already acquired the domain Kumo.com last week and since then has been also securing all the other variants of Kumo (.net, .jp, .fr and so on).

All these domains are now being held by CSC Corporate Domains, Microsoft's domain registrar of choice at the moment. CSC Corporate reportedly picked the domain up from semiconductor equipment supplier Schlumberger, which renounced at the domain a few years ago.

Kumo is the Japanese term for "spider" and "cloud," both words fitting the general idea of search technology. The acquiring of Kumo.com and other domains for Kumo sparked speculation that Microsoft is making a second re-branding after MSN and Live.com.

Another hint that Microsoft is taking measures to boost Live Search is that it has recently hired Sean Suchter, currently Yahoo's vice president of search technology. He will join Microsoft in late December as general manager of the company's Search Technology Center.
Most industry experts and analysts will tell you that Suchter is a big gain for Microsoft and a loss for Yahoo.

According to the latest data provided by ComScore and Citi Investment Research, Microsoft's Live Search only owns 8.9 percent of the search market, an insignificant piece of the pie considering the fact that Google has about 63 percent of it and Yahoo has approximately 20.

The big question here is whether Kumo.com will have more success that Live.com, which reached a dead end and hasn't grown in the past few months despite Microsoft's programs to actually pay users for using the service.