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Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

myprasanna.posterous.com

61–70 of 130 posts

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#61
post #41

Bing is not really providing anything more than google's service. It only shows "big company's" routine of trying to drive others out of business. Death for Bing.

I disagree. I remembered Bing's decision engine commercials when looking for a plane ticket. Turns out that Bing is way better for flights than Google is, by far. Just try typing New York City to Los Angeles into both search engines. Bing finds what you are after and Google does not.

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#62
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure this is relevant progress but 18 march bing for "HG download" gave no mercurial results (hg was assumed to be a mistyping of HD), by 24 march it was giving all mercurial results. I twittered about both. That is at least anecdotal evidence that things are progressing in some way or another.

Unpredictability is progress?

Returning meaningful results is progress.

Why would you want a predictably wrong answer, you must be a manager.

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#63

I don't know that Bing has "failed" yet, but I highly doubt it'll be anything other than one amongst many in the pack in 5 years. Microsoft has always been good at the pivotal turnaround. Recognizing when a key moment was on the wind, mustering together a tremendous effort, making a good number of smart decisions and putting out a solid anchor product that (re)cements their position in the industry and reinvigorates…

> "I don't know that Bing has "failed" yet, but I highly doubt it'll be anything other than one amongst many in the pack in 5 years." For Microsoft, having a full featured reliable non-core product with measurable market share is a success because it allows Microsoft to offer vertical integration without the specter of anti-trust allegations - imagine the howling in DC and Europe if Bing controlled 70% of search (nev…

This was not the goal. Recall that they tried to buy Yahoo and merge into a solid competitor agains Google. I'm sure there are many smart people still left at MS, but not as many as you make it sound.

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#64

Perhaps a bit OT, but... The post seemed to be riddled with formatting and grammar errors. This rubbed my old-school English sensibilities at first, but then I began to enjoy its rough feel. After all, it's a post about how people who worked tirelessly to bring a product to market were shipping things while the rest of Microsoft slept. The story very clearly describes a dichotomy in Microsoft's culture between proces…

> What mattered was to get the idea out and to start the conversation, editing and polish would follow later.

On the other hand, careless writing shows that the author places little value on his thoughts, for if he thought them important he would spend a little more time on their delivery, ensuring the contents don't get destroyed in the process.

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#66
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not following you. I imagine that the Bing team would gladly increase their market share in exchange for the costs involved.

Of course more market share is good. But Microsoft is not purely interested in growing share with Bing; non-differentiation with Google is a good thing in and of itself. The less differentiated Microsoft is from Google, the greater perception of their platform having feature parity with Google. That way consumers are not forced to choose based on features, just ecosystem. This is a the reason that Microsoft is a fast…

Microsoft used to be able to "embrace and extend" in order to extinguish the competitor. With Bing it seems they can only "embrace", by which I mean copying and trying to decrease differentiation. But look at the trend. In the future, when/if Google search incorporates social feedback effects (ala +1), Bing won't even have the user-base to be able to copy the competitor, let alone extend and extinguish.

One look at my website statistics tells me Bing is already as good as dead.

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#67

> They totally din't see Google as a threat, till it had a huge market cap. (Don't be evil, was a joke?) Does having a huge market cap automatically make a company evil?

Not automatically. But I think it would be easy to prove there's a correlation between market cap and corruption.

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#68
post #42

The whole article seems to be back to front. As far as I knew Live search was essentially failing then they made it Bing and it's started to succeed. Am I missing something here or what? I'm no expert on the history but it seems to me that the opposite of what the author is saying actually happened!

I think that's one of the objectives of this article; provide that alternate perspective. I thought that Bing was the true turning point as well, but I never gave Live Search a fair chance then, and I don't think many others did either. To me, it looks like the author saw Bing/Live Search as something truly transformational within Microsoft. Public perception was that Live was a failure. But if I understand currently…

> Public perception was that Live was a failure.

At that time I was paying a lot of attention to search results, from two perspectives: 1) I had some slightly unusual / difficult searches I performed regularly, and 2) examining search terms that brought people to some sites I ran.

For case 1, Google simply wiped the floor with Live. Note that Live had the most relevant results in their index, but they'd be way down on the 5th page, 10th page, wherever.

For case 2, the majority of people coming to my sites from Live were coming there with search terms indicating that they did not want my site. For example, I had content for Phoenix, AZ and some polls. My site stayed within the top 5 on Live for search terms like "phoenix polling locations." Of course every site gets some of this from any search engine, but with Live is was problematic.

My perception was that Live was a failure, and I think my reasons were valid.

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#69
post #64

Perhaps a bit OT, but... The post seemed to be riddled with formatting and grammar errors. This rubbed my old-school English sensibilities at first, but then I began to enjoy its rough feel. After all, it's a post about how people who worked tirelessly to bring a product to market were shipping things while the rest of Microsoft slept. The story very clearly describes a dichotomy in Microsoft's culture between proces…

> What mattered was to get the idea out and to start the conversation, editing and polish would follow later. On the other hand, careless writing shows that the author places little value on his thoughts, for if he thought them important he would spend a little more time on their delivery, ensuring the contents don't get destroyed in the process.

I believe the truth is as follows:

You infer from careless writing that the author places little value on his thoughts, because if you were writing them and you thought them important, you would spend a little more time on their delivery.

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