Back in the 1990s (not that there's anything wrong with that) a lot of companies drew a lot of venture capital promising to target ads based on who you were rather than what you were looking at.

The ploy failed. It turned out the cost of targeting exceeded the premium advertisers could charge for the space.

On the other hand context-based ads, targetting based on the content of a page or a search, continued to draw premium prices. It still works.

So Microsoft actually took a step backward this week when it launched adCenter, which targets based on users' use of Microsoft resources, plus Experian credit scores.

They also, once again, didn't do a complete trademark search. Finding this particular example, which I don't believe has any affiliation with Microsoft, took me all of 10 seconds. (On Google.)

Analysts (who probably were not in the business the last time this came around) praised the effort, saying they could now easily target, say, men earning $50-100k/year in Seattle.

But they could do that already, simply by buying ads in a publication or site aimed at such people, or buying a list from a list broker.

So where's the value? Some hint that it's in applying this targeting to TV streams. But the CP/M on TV doesn't exceed that of print. (They get more money because they get bigger audiences, which makes up for the higher cost.)

The bottom line is this. In its effort to follow rather than lead, Microsoft has once again gone down a dead-end.