Microsoft Offer Free iPods As Incentive for Aussies to Use Live Search

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Whilst Microsoft’s dislike of all things Apple is well documented – MS even have ‘iPod Amnesty Bins’ in their headquarters to allow its staff to liberate themselves from Apple’s clutches – its being reported that MS are offering free iPods (namely Apple’s iPod Nano, Shuffle and Touch models) as an incentive intended to coax Australian internet users to try out MS’s newly revamped Live Search service via a scheme known as Secret Search.

‘Where we don’t have a great product or we don’t have a product at all there’s no internal edict that says we’re not allowed to use competitor products,’ said Alex Parsons, head of Live Search who undoubtedly would have much preferred to have offered up MS’s Zune as an incentive but couldn’t because the Zune is not available in Australia. Quite whether offering Zunes would have served as an incentive for anyone to re-try Live Search, however, remains open to question (not that we’re into Zune-bashing here on TFTS – we’re not quite that ‘trendy’).

To put matters into stark perspective with respect to the mountain Live Search has to climb, Live Search, whilst beating Yahoo!7’s 1.4m Australian users, is way behind Google’s 8.7m users with just 3m users using MS’s search service and we suspect it’s going to take a great deal more than an iPod giveaway to wrestle away Google’s dominant standing in the search market.

[via Brisbane Times]