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Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

myprasanna.posterous.com

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Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#91

Post by forwardslash »

enjo wrote: post #82

This is tangential, but somehow related: My level of frustration Redmond has reached epic levels. My company spends thousands of dollars a week managing advertising campaigns on Adcenter. They have an API which has been nothing but issues, but given the breadth of our advertising base it's absolutely necessary that we use it. Today we have entered day number FIVE of an outage in which the API (at least one critical p…

I assume you're using the REST API? While they try and roll out a fix, have you tried to use the adCenter Desktop to at least somewhat manage the ads?

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#92

Post by TheCondor »

A buddy and I were drinking months back, and for whatever reason (most likely several beers was the reason) he misinterpreted the Bing and Facebook arrangement that was made for "Facebook is buying Bing."

Completely un-Microsoft, I can't see it happening but if it did.. Damn that could make things interesting.

Bing is interesting, it's a great attempt. The problem is Microsoft, so long as they're running it and setting the "standard" for it, it's going to be a failure. It's not going to knock Google off their perch. It's just not. And anything less than that will be a failure. Cut that team and product free, hand it over to like a facebook? IBM went through some similar stuff, MS should be spinning stuff out, if their current phone effort fails again to live up to their hype, they should just cut that group free too, let them go and be successful. that stuff creates new industries which in turn create new opportunities for everybody, including MS. Let Bing or Bing + FB cultivate an army of guys that want to get rich and can control their own destiny, the output will be far more interesting

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#93

Post by Corvus »

raganwald wrote: post #69
puns wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Indeed that is true, but it is also true that if you are writing things for other people to read, then what value those other people put on your delivery is more important than what value you put on your delivery.

If you are writing only for yourself, then things like grammar and spelling are less important because, presumably, you know what you meant. However, if you want other people to value what you write, grammar and spelling become very important.

First, because poor grammar and spelling sabotage your meaning and delivery. There were several sentences in the article where I had to stop and think "err... what is he trying to say?" It is entirely likely I misinterpreted the meaning of some of these sentences. The fact that the author understood and valued those sentences is of utterly no help to me.

Second, there are people who believe confusing and ungrammatical writing are symptoms of confused and unknowledgeable writers. I understand you may not agree with this but, again, if you are writing for other people then it is the other person's impressions you must consider, not your own.

Defending ungrammatical writing by challenging a reader's inferences and thoughts is not convincing because, if you are writing for other readers, it is precisely those inferences and thoughts you should be addressing.

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#94

Post by rorrr »

aChrisSmith wrote: post #78
rorrr wrote: post #70

> Bing was extremely lavish in compensation, making offers to the best hackers for $90K/year Is this a joke?

No. Remember the article talked about poaching students right out of college. $90k a year isn't much for an experienced developer, however right out of college (and at the time) that was 10-20k more than they could expect joining another company.

"experienced hackers" and "students right out of college" are quite different in my world view.

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#95

Post by redthrowaway »

jules wrote: post #13
gjm11 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder whether it's an automatic consequence of having substantial negative karma. (I'm ambivalent about the stealth-blacklisting thing. It's probably the right thing to do with genuinely abusive users. It might be the right thing with people genuinely incapable of contributing much. But I've seen too many cases where someone's comments are all being auto-deaded -- invisibly to them, AIUI -- with no obvious reason…

Right, the system is far too trigger happy. Instead of showing a newcomer what kind of comments are valued here and possibly gaining a valuable new contributor, the system severely punishes beginner mistakes. We can't reasonably expect that a new user knows what kind of comments are valued because on the rest of the internet such comments are perfectly acceptable. Perhaps something like Quora does would help: before…

"Perhaps something like Quora does would help: before you can use the site you have to do a quiz on what kind of comments are good comments."

Really? Sorry, but that sounds like a terrible idea. HN is already insular enough, we don't need to start demanding newcomers pass a test before we let them comment.

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#96

Post by dwwoelfel »

sukuriant wrote: post #87
DarrenLehane wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume English is not his first language, as he also just made a job posting ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2422799 ) which has the same errors such as "din't".

din't is easily a sticky key or a fast-typing error. It happens to any of us and doesn't necessarily say that the person has a separate first language. Furthermore, even though it's good form to read over a message you're sending and remove the typoes, grammar-os and other such issues, it doesn't always happen :)

It's too consistent to be a typo. It appears twice in the article, twice in one of his comments here and once in his job posting.

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#97

Post by rufugee »

Bing was extremely lavish in compensation, making offers to the best hackers for $90K/year when the adjacent teams were making $75K/year offers.

This is what really stood out to me. I'm in tech management these days...I pay my good developers close to $90K, and I'm no Google or Microsoft. What's wrong with this picture? Bing was created what...four years ago? Is this really a realistic salary for the best hackers?

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#98

Post by hexis »

myprasanna wrote: post #90
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #65

"They [Bing] had weekly release cycles - faster than Google back then" Hmm. I'm gonna have to disagree with that part. :)

Matt, How long would you estimate, for a search changelist to hit the production at Google? I've got friends working there. Prepare to be surprised.

I think you've got a bit of a surprise in store for you, too, when you find out what Matt does for a living.

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#99

Post by credo »

raganwald wrote: post #12

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…

English is his second language and the grammar mistakes weren't a big deal for me.Some of the over-the-top language (especially in his recruiting post yesterday :) was.

imo the post essentially says that the people he liked at Bing were all great. He then goes to suggest that the departure of all these great people (presumably including him) is equivalent to the death of Bing. He also chooses to indict unnamed "professional managers" while praising several other individuals (and managers) by name

Prasanna says that he is surprised to see his post at the "top of HN today". However, imo there is nothing surprising about a Microsoft-bashing post being on the front page:).

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#100

Post by jules »

redthrowaway wrote: post #95
jules wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, the system is far too trigger happy. Instead of showing a newcomer what kind of comments are valued here and possibly gaining a valuable new contributor, the system severely punishes beginner mistakes. We can't reasonably expect that a new user knows what kind of comments are valued because on the rest of the internet such comments are perfectly acceptable. Perhaps something like Quora does would help: before…

"Perhaps something like Quora does would help: before you can use the site you have to do a quiz on what kind of comments are good comments." Really? Sorry, but that sounds like a terrible idea. HN is already insular enough, we don't need to start demanding newcomers pass a test before we let them comment.

Let's see. There are two groups of people: people who would have passed the test and people who would not have. The people who would not have would most likely be hellbanned after their first 3 comments (and of course people are allowed to take the test as many times as they want). So you lose nothing. By using a test fewer legitimate people get hellbanned. In other words, this is only going to improve the situation. I'm not talking about a difficult test here: just a couple of questions like:

Comment: LOL

Is this an acceptable comment?

Right now people are used to that being an acceptable comment on the rest of the internet. These people currently get hellbanned on HN because other people downvote these comments. It's not a test for testing whether the people are acceptable on HN, it's method of teaching customs and a test for whether people have read the guidelines.

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