Microsoft launches Clarity, a new web analytics product in beta, to compete with A/B testing tools like Google Optimize
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
Google set the template for this market with its 2017 launch of free Google Optimize alongside the premium Optimize 360 tier, extending an enterprise push that began when the Analytics 360 Suite went after Adobe's Marketing Cloud in 2016.
Microsoft's Clarity beta is its answer: a web analytics product aimed at the same site-owner audience, arriving on top of a subscription analytics stack it has been assembling since [[a:830952|the Cortana Analytics Suite bundled Power BI and Azure Machine Learning into a monthly offering]] in 2015.
First-order effects
- Site owners running experiments through Google Optimize gain a second major-vendor option at the free end of the market, where Microsoft's beta competes directly.
- Microsoft moves from selling analytics infrastructure (Power BI, Azure ML services) to owning the front-end measurement product where marketers actually work.
Second-order effects
- Google's two-tier free-plus-enterprise structure comes under price pressure at the premium end, since a rival backed by a competing cloud can subsidize the entry tier.
- Adobe and other standalone marketing-analytics vendors face the same squeeze from both directions, as the hyperscalers bundle measurement with cloud subscriptions they already sell.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, A/B testing and session analytics stop being standalone product categories and become features attached to cloud platforms, with vendor choice increasingly tied to which cloud an enterprise already runs.
The trend: Web analytics and experimentation tools are being absorbed into hyperscaler platform bundles, with free tiers serving as funnels into enterprise cloud subscriptions.