Searchblog has been passed a very interesting looking Powerpoint presentation that suggests that Microsoft is leveraging its installed software base to get companies to buy into its search service. The presentation claims that signing on with this will provide the customer with $2-$10 worth of credit per computer annually.

As a comment on John Batelle's blog points out, paying companies to take your search service is a bad sign. Live.com has some very interesting elements to it, and a lot of potential. It's a bit of a shame that certain widgets on the Live site - such as the one that displays Hotmail email - seem to be broken, mind. It's kept us going back to Hotmail.com to pick up our daily allotment of spam.

To a certain extent, the dominance of Internet Explorer has meant that MSN Search has had a slight edge anyway, but it should also be pointed out that Microsoft is suggesting customers push IE7 and Live Search as the platform of choice to their employees. All's fair in love and business, but this does hark back to the sort of tactics that Microsoft has been famous for in the past. It'll be interesting to see how Google and Yahoo respond to this.