Cashback on Microsoft Investment?

As soon as I understood the workings of JellyFish (which took a while), I greatly appreciated how unique this CSE was in a cluttered landscape of copy-cats and also-rans. That is why I was very disappointed to see the hack job that Microsoft recently did on JellyFish’s set up.

First and foremost, at last check, Steve Balmer runs one multi-national company and I run none. So, what do I know?

However, I can at least point out, in the tradition of FedEx killing off Kinkos, and Sprint overrunning Nextel, that it is not always a good idea to effectively change or dissolve a strong brand.

JellyFish was no industry heavy weight, but they had rightfully earned a good buzz for having something different. The recent moves by Microsoft in keeping only the Smack Shopping feature, and moving the rest of the JellyFish program to the Live - Cashback hybrid (see http://search.live.com/cashback), saddens me. At least Microsoft owns the Cashback URL to redirect to their Live.com subdomain, but I am suspicious of all things connected to Live.

The free Live Product Search has never worked quite right from Day 1, and seems to have been left adrift lately as a poor imitation of GoogleBase. So when the JellyFish product listings are moved over to Live, I have to take a deep breath and hope this is not a continuation of the pattern. Officially, I understand the JellyFish.com domain will live on and the Smack Shopping feature will be expanded to include an entire social shopping set up to rival Faceback…not sure how this will happen exactly since Facebook is still playing with shopping systems. However, this doesn’t change the fact that JellyFish as I knew it, has sadly passed on to a new life.

So, in always looking for the sun through dark clouds, I eagerly anticipate what Smack Shopping will evolve into, and hope Cashback grows to it’s potential. However, for now I will remember a quirky little engine that had a boat load of innovative ideas.

June 4th, 2008