To maintain the relationship, Inktomi had to agree that MSN is under no obligation to provide any attribution to Inktomi or its parent company and that it will not provide other Inktomi customers with a service superior to that offered MSN.
In a quarterly report filed a week ago with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Inktomi said it has a deal to provide MSN with web search services until December 2005. MSN accounted for 55.9% of Inktomi’s search revenue in the fourth quarter.
In early January, Inktomi said the MSN deal was due to expire in April 2003, and many in the industry expected MSN to seek its search services elsewhere, in order not to promote or become reliant on rival Yahoo.
There was precedent for this. Inktomi won the MSN deal after Microsoft dropped previous search provider AltaVista Co when it became clear it was providing advertising for a competing portal on every search results page.
By persuading Inktomi to agree that MSN does not have to attribute its search functionality to Inktomi or Yahoo, Microsoft has essentially sidestepped the problem of advertising its rival, at least in terms of the average consumer’s awareness.
The new deal should also mean Yahoo will not be able to use its ownership of Inktomi to offer an inferior service to MSN for competitive reasons.
Source: Computerwire
