Microsoft to make live.com the default start page of IE 7 and Vista. This was expected; and I’m not even sure what I’d rather they do, but it’s still annoying to see Microsoft once again attempting to leverage it’s monopoly to get into markets it’s previously been unable to compete in.
My prediction: This won’t actually make that much of a difference. Google and Yahoo already have huge mindshare and loyalty amongst their users, and still have almost a year to develop their products to compete against the “default settings” advantage. Given that adoption of Vista and IE 7 is going to be relatively slow, I don’t see this as hooking any more users than those who continue to use MSN as their home page and search right now.
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