Microsoft’s chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, said the company received a much-needed wakeup call from Google. The billions in search advertising revenue that Google was raking in every quarter made Microsoft realize they hadn’t paid enough attention to that market. Ozzie told analysts and investors at a Goldman Sachs conference Microsoft would not copy Google’s search strategy or its releases of free, web-based productivity tools. He hinted at a “software-plus service” combining P-C and web-based software, but offered no specifics in his comments.

Google has television on its mind, and wants to hire someone to lead its charge into the TV advertising market. A job opening posted at Google seeks a head of national TV sales to work out of their New York office. The person who wins this position will guide the development of Google Television, as the company continues to try and branch out beyond Internet advertising. An Ad-Age report cited TV executives as being worried about Google bringing down ad pricing. Google believes its auction-based model will bring new customers to the TV ad market instead.

A Yahoo executive trashed the usability of Google’s products, and blamed that for the low adoption of services like Google Talk and Gmail. Jeff Bonforte, senior director of real-time communications at Yahoo, said Google doesn’t have the intimate connection Yahoo does with its users. “When it comes to consumer applications, no-one is more successful than Yahoo hands down,” he said. Since Google is ruled by engineers, their products aren’t built to have mass appeal. Other than their search and maps products, Bonforte said Google has had no success appealing to a wide audience.

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