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What do you do when you're the number four or five player in search with a single-digit share? Hopefully something different -- and compelling.

That's what the folks at Ask.com have in mind. Actually their strategy is both different and a return to the company's roots when it started out as AskJeeves.

"Search and keywords are the low-hanging fruit. When you think about what people want it's something more natural," Ask.com's president Doug Leeds told me in a recent briefing on the company's direction.

That more natural approach is to ask a question, the very foundation the company (then AskJeeves complete with butler logo) was founded on.

"We are Ask.com and we were popularized as a question/answer service. It's silly to run away from that brand, we should be embracing it," said Leeds who adds technology advances have made it a lot easier to provide a broad range of consistent, relevant answers to English language queries than when the company started.

Leeds claims there's a "psychographic need" to get an answer to a question. "I don't want to search the Web, I want you (the search engine) to do that," he said.

I'm guessing not many folks at Google are old enough to remember Adam Osborne (though CEO Eric Schmidt is one). Back in the '80s Osborne's namesake Osborne Computer Corp. introduced the first popular portable computer.

In those days, a 25-pound luggable qualified as portable and the Osborne sold like hotcakes.

But It was also one of the great early flameouts of the PC era. Osborne made the mistake of pre-announcing a successor machine months before it could be delivered and sales of its existing line dried up sending the company into a tailspin it never recovered from. The preannouncement, while according to some accounts wasn't the main cause of Osborne's demise, became known as the "[Osborne Effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect)," a cautionary tale for any company considering pre-announcing products before they're available.

But there have been many significance pre-announcements of new tech products. The famously secretive Apple previewed the iPhone six months ahead of delivery. The company said the details would have come out in its FCC filing so it figured better to spill the beans on its own terms. More importantly, Apple didn't have to worry about dampening sales since the iPhone was its first foray in the phone market.

When the big boy kicks sand in your face, you can either go home and sulk or make jokes about what big feet the bully has. You've gotta love upstart Zoho for taking the second course of action.

An early provider of online productivity applications, Zoho has moved quickly to build out a [substantial suite of integrated applications](/software/article.php/3817781/Zoho+Mobilizes+Online+Apps.htm) that compete with Google and others in the cloud computing space.

Zoho's CEO Sridhar Vembu had an entertaining [blog post ](http://blogs.zoho.com/general/microsoft-calls-zoho-the-fake-office-so-does-that-mean-bing-is)yesterday responding to a Microsoft executive's reference to "fake Office" products. Earlier this week, [Microsoft announced price cuts ](/software/article.php/3846831/Microsoft+Targets+Salesforce+and+Oracle.htm)to its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) by a third, bringing the price down from $15 per user to $10 per month. Google's App Suite, by comparison, costs $50 per user, per year.

Vembu quotes Ron Markezich, corporate vice president of Microsoft Online, as noting the company offers a scaled-down version of BPOS for $36 a year. And furthermore "...we're not seeing any inclination that Zoho or Google or Zimbra or any other of those offering fake Office capabilities can replace [Microsoft Office]."

**That was all too much of a red flag for Vembu not to charge after:**