You know a company is having dark thoughts about its own mortality when it starts sticking the word “Live” in front of all its new products.  Such has to be the case with Microsoft which released its Live Search from beta today and launched Live.com in 47 markets worldwide.  The company also launched Live Local Search in the U.K. and the U.S. and announced that–surprise, surprise–Live Search will be the search engine of choice for MSN, its media and entertainment portal, which the company points out, attracts more than 465 million unique users worldwide per month.  

That sounds pretty impressive until you do a little research and discover that in July 2006,  Google sites handled 2.7 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! with 1.8 billion and MSN-Microsoft with 802 million. (Perhaps, more telling is the fact that I just left the Live Search site to go to Google to look up those statistics.)

Christopher Payne, corporate vice president of Live Search at Microsoft calls it the “core search and monetization platform” for the company’s services business which also includes its Windows Live (that word again) online applications and social networking services.  Much of the company’s future success is riding on its ability to transition to SaaS so there is a lot at stake in making the Windows Live initiative work.

Live Search strikes me as a perfectly decent “me-too” search engine.  As far as I can tell, Microsoft doesn’t claim it does anything that Google doesn’t do or that it does anything better.  It’s just plain vanilla search. 

Will it advance the cause of Microsoft’s survival in the post-desktop application world?  As we say in New York, it couldn’t hurt.  Microsoft is a dominant player in both the consumer and enterprise software markets and a great American success story.  It didn’t get that way just by becoming the biggest bully on the block (although that certainly didn’t hurt).  There are a lot of very smart people who work there and real, rather than cosmetic, innovation should get easier when Bill Gates, perhaps the last of the Henry Ford type of old fashioned entrepreneurs and a man who never really “got” the internet, steps down.

Microsoft’s main problem is that it is hopelessly uncool in a culture where new and hip are virtues in themselves.  The Apple ad with the pudgy guy with glasses and jacket and tie (representing Microsoft) is always being out-featured by the cool skinny dude (representing Apple) plays directly into the widely-held (among people of a certain age) perception that Microsoft is hopelessly retro.  What saves Microsoft in the enterprise market, for now anyway, is that there are lot more pudgy fat guys with glasses and jackets and ties in charge of corporations than there are cool skinny dudes.  That will change over time, though, as the kids who grew up on net culture enter the workforce and take on greater buying responsibility.  Microsoft has about five years or to re-invent its image or come up with something radically new that will blow the trendies away or it will be as nearly dead as Apple was before the iPod. 

Zune and a Google wannabe are not going to do the trick.