The new Zune, or the new Windows smartphone?

The New York Times (Thanks for removing the registration requirement, NYT bods!) puts it best; Microsoft is going a fair ways outside its core competency by taking on Google at the advertising game.
Google has said it will buy DoubleClick for $3.1bn, regulatory problems allowing; Microsoft has already shelled out $6bn for aQuantive. It's going to be a jolly tight - run thing.

That said, it sounds as if Microsoft is going to take a very different tack. Brian McAndrews, the aQuantive chief now running things at the Microsoft subsidiary, is keen to divorce ads from search, concentrating instead on telling advertisers how their customers get to - and click through - their adverts.

This quote says it very well:

'Mr. McAndrews contends that search engines, which long have claimed
credit for sending people to companies’ Web sites, do not deserve it
all.

“Google gets all the credit, and in fact, you might have
just gone to Google to type in the U.R.L.,” Mr. McAndrews said,
pointing out that people often search for companies’ names after seeing
their ads elsewhere.'

I can attest that many, many people open their web browser and type
URLs into the search bar, or the search engine set as their home page.
We get email all the time from readers of Computeractive
telling us that our links are broken, and usually it's because the
links we put out are too fresh to have been indexed by their search
engine of choice. These aren't daft people, either - they're
intelligent and articulate. perhaps it's a sign that we rely on search
engine put in front of us too much.

Should aQuantive's method prove successful, however, there might be
one side-effect. Many organisations rely on revenue from search engines
- for example, the Mozilla foundation gets a big chunk of cash from
Google, as readers happily use the search bar in the Firefox browser,
or in the Firefox homepage, to search. A win this way would most
certainly put the hurt on some of Microsoft's most successful
antagonists.

Regardless, McAndrews has a very good point to make, and there's mroe
than a grain of truth in his assertion. One can only wonder if this
latest punt from Microsoft will go between the posts, or whether it'll
be this years' chcoclate brown, DRM-crippled music player.