Is Microsoft 'pulling a Net Applications' with comScore?

Summary: comScore, which is paid by Microsoft in many ways, claims that Microsoft is gaining at Google's expense but other surveys that measure the same thing say that both Yahoo and Microsoft dropped while Google gained

THE previous post was a reminder of how Microsoft insiders can help take over companies or other bodies. Microsoft has this phrase about "insider friend, ‘the fox’" and we also saw Yahoo getting hijack by agents of Microsoft who gradually increased dependency and gave Yahoo to Microsoft (without the need for an acquisition).

Here we have Yahoo and Microsoft increasing "integration", as expected. Was there a virtual merger nobody heard about?

Last week, Yahoo posted an update about the search alliance with Microsoft, indicating that it would "protect the holiday period," "ensure a quality transition," and "provide a window-of-time." Advertisers were still left with questions, however, and Yahoo has addressed some of them today.

Yahoo is said to be lobbying a lot already (also in MSN), which makes one wonder how much lobbying it is doing against Google [1, 2].

“The money which Microsoft gives to comScore is money well spent.”In any event, Microsoft's hijack of Yahoo aside, we are more concerned to see Microsoft's partner comScore [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10] saying the exact opposite of the rest about Google's US market share in the month of April. comScore claims that it declined and it even promotes Microsoft. Microsoft-sponsored firms are always showing the opposite of non-Microsoft-sponsored ones, at least in recent months. Once there is money on the table, there is reason to play little games with statistic (by controlling the data set) as it's not likely to be a mere coincidence when it happens time after time. Here it is fueling messages from Microsoft boosters and other sources where writers are ignoring comScore's relationship with Microsoft (at the very least there ought to be a disclosure). The very opposite results were shown some days ago for the same month and region, but that's not the story the press is telling [1, 2].

The money which Microsoft gives to comScore is money well spent. Microsoft also gives money to Net Applications and this relationship brings about/receives similar results (belittling GNU/Linux).

In reality, Microsoft is losing about $3 billion per year (at the current pace) competing with Google and its deals that remove Google from menus are expensive [1, 2], not to mention advertising.

5. Uniforms: The Storm signed a sponsorship deal with Bing, Microsoft's search engine, and will display the Bing name across the chest of jerseys and on the back of warm-up tops. But that's not the only makeover. No more calling officials zebras — their uniforms resemble the NBA with cream coloring accented by orange on the shoulder.

But anyway, the big story is that numbers from comScore are contradicting other numbers from other firms (Hitwise for example) and they are contradicting these in the same way one ought to expect, namely that they benefit Microsoft, which is among comScore's paymasters.

comScore is apparently expanding areas/scope of those numbers that are not trustworthy. What's next? Will comScore start measuring operating system market share and say that GNU/Linux has 0.1% market share? ⬆