The financial community is increasingly fretting over Microsoft’s Bill Gates’ surprising comment last week about paying people to use MSN’s search tool:
“We’ll actually go to users and say instead of us keeping all that ad revenue, we’ll actually share some of it back with the user. The user essentially will get paid, either money or free content or software things that they wouldn’t get if they didn’t use that search engine.”
While I suppose there are ways to make this kinda work — and economists will love the idea of offering incentives to effect change — there is, in aggregate, far more creativity among people outside Microsoft about abusing this sort of thing than there is creativity inside Microsoft in coming up with ways to keep it safe and clean.
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Good comment.
I can almost feel a cottage industry poping up to absuse these kind of incentives.
I’ve heard there are villages in India that support themselves by playing MMORPGs (Everquest, World of Warcraft, etc.) all day, and auctioning off the virtual crap they collect on the Internet.