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Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

myprasanna.posterous.com

111–120 of 130 posts

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#111
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm highly tolerant of spelling/grammar errors, normally. Who cares about "it's" vs. "its" in this context, right? But in this case, I needed to re-read every sentence. Even after re-reading it a few times, I had to guess the author's intended meaning. That is just a failure to communicate.

Really? I did not notice any ambiguity. Can you give an example?

"Let me say that again: Attacking a market incumbent on an area of it's core strength - It's hardest in technology companies."

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#112

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…

So Bing is now entirely some sort of anti-trust hedge that doesn't need to succeed on its own? That is one impressive twist of thought.

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#113
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That might work if adcenter desktop was actually stable!

That would be of little comfort I'd imagine if you had a lot of custom stuff running through the API. At least they opened the thing up recently to add customers, that's a step in the right direction. (Although that could also be the cause of instability, they did have years to prepare for it though.)

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Yeah, except Bing gets to mine Facebook and Google doesn't. Maybe that's why it has a higher success rate?

http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/20...

http://www.stateofsearch.com/bing-gaining-share-in-the-us-su...

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

[deleted]

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#116
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Got it :) I still know for a fact that, it takes at-least a month on average, for a search change list to reach production. Would you disagree Matt?

I'm an ex-Googler, and I disagree. Before I left the GWS team (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/29/google_web_server/) became a model for how frequent, stable releases should be done within the company. That's all I'll say.

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#117
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opposed to it because I think it wouldn't keep bad posters off, I'm opposed to it because it would keep most posters off. It's arrogant and self-righteous. "Sorry, you have to prove you're good enough to post on our holy news aggregator." It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth and it's the last thing this community needs.

So you're saying that the current method of silencing those people without even notifying them is preferred? They keep posting and most times their posts add value. Yet these posts are invisible to users without the showdead option on.

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#118
But what if Bing uses Microsoft's Facebook ties to bring social to search? Isn't that the root of "Google is scared by social" thing that's going on?

A lot of times when things seem to be dead, they are on the edge of killing everything else.

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#119
post #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.

If it would be easy, then perhaps you should do it. Such a conclusion would have a nice amount of academic value.

I imagine there are a large number of small and/or untraded businesses with dishonest or illegal practices. Perhaps data would even show that larger market cap indicates corruption is less likely, depending on your measurement for corruption?

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got it :) I still know for a fact that, it takes at-least a month on average, for a search change list to reach production. Would you disagree Matt?

I'm an ex-Googler, and I disagree. Before I left the GWS team ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/29/google_web_server/ ) became a model for how frequent, stable releases should be done within the company. That's all I'll say.

I've just recently spoken with my friends, and I know for a fact that it atleast takes a month from point of checkin to review/test/stage/production. If you disagree, I think what you are talking about, is probably an exception and not the norm.

Being secretive about release cycles is pointless stealth.

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