Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Wants to Take on Google
blenderking writes "We do view Google more and more as a competitor. We believe that we can provide consumers with a better product and a better user experience. That's something that we're actively looking at doing,", says Bob Visse, director of marketing for Microsoft's MSN Internet services division, said. Full article at: Yahoo. This could have fit in with yesterday's April Fool's stories..."
If Steve "Uncle Fester" Balmy thinks he can produce a better product than Google, then I personally invite him to stick his neck out and do it!
However, he should bear in mind that whatever MS creates:
(1) Will have to have a noticeable lack of any sort of banner ads or popups.
(2) Will have to have a clean, simple, easy-to-use interface that's compatible with ANY BROWSER, from the text-based Lynx on up to the latest version of Opera, Netscape, or IE.
(3) Will have to be fully compatible with text-based screen readers, such as those used by vision-impaired folks.
(4) Will actually have to work as well as, or better than, Google if MS wants it to have a ghost of a chance.
Right now, Google completely fulfills requirements 1-3. I will be watching with great amusement as Uncle Steve and his Cronies try to add "value" to the search engine "experience," and most likely fall flat on their collective arses doing it.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
But they don't need a better search engine to beat Google. They just need to neatly integrate their SE into Windows XP2 or whatever, really push it on sites such as Hotmail and MSN and other high-visibility sites, things like that. They are Microsoft, they don't need to have the better product to beat the competition.
In fact, I think their history shows that it is in fact the other way around - MS managed to get the upper hand many times with an inferior product.
Of course, it's Google. It's got both quality and enormous brand recognition - not an easy target, not even for Microsoft
Karma: Could be worse (could be raining)
Funny you should mention that. I searched for "Linux" at search.msn.com just for kicks, and the first three results went like this:
# Amazon.com
Buy Linux software at the Amazon.com software store.
# Introducing Linux (at tech.msn.com)
Find the latest news and information on this operating system.
# Alternatives to Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (at microsoft.com)
Learn about the Microsoft alternatives and how to move to them from open source products.
The three after it are all sponsor links. They're marked as such, but not clearly. After that, it continues with some more links, which are of somewhat better quality. In contrast, Google's top three results are linux.org, linux.com, and redhat.com.
Until MS separates out the advertising a bit better and stops skewing the top links quite so much to suit its own opinion, people aren't going to use their search site. Oh, and they need to lose the advertising image and simplify their page.
For the last several weeks, my web server logs have shown that my sites have been crawled heavily by bots from Microsoft-owned IP addresses. (I know they're bots because, even though they don't identify themselves, they DO pick up robots.txt and obey it.)
This has been going on since, oh, about mid-February.
Aside from not identifying themselves, the bots are well-behaved: they pick up and obey robots.txt, and they only request a single page at a time and take a few minutes between requests so as to not overtax my servers.
So, yeah...this announcement is no big surprise to me.
I do. They make a better browser. The make a better word processor. They make the best mice and joysticks. They make great games. XP is an excellent OS. Not everything they make is great but no company has a perfect track record.
Back in grad school (starting in '93) I was anti-MS, for no good reason other than they were so big. When I bought a new computer I strongly considered geting OS/2 for it (phew...dodged that bullet). I bought the WordPerfect suite to write my thesis with. I used Navigator to surf the web on my PC. You know, a funny thing happened. WordPerfect was ok for small documents but for something like my modest thesis with images it sucked. I gave MS Office a go (I had never used it before then) and was sold...it got the job done. After I left grad school IE3 was released...the first version to exceed NN. IE has never looked back. For an OS, I have XP at work and home (in addition to an installation of Linux via VMWare for testing) and it works. It doesn't crash, runs fine. One of my Linux zealot coworkers seems to be forever downloading the latest build of something or looking for a better widget, all while Linux looks more and more like Windows on the desktop. I do use OpenOffice.org suite on my home computer, because I gave my wife my copy of Office XP to use on her computer. For simple spreadsheet work and basic letter writing it's fine. It's still no match for Office though.
So years ago I gave up the pro-this, anti-that stance and took one that's pro-me. I use what works best for me. Period. Best search engine? Google (which is not a verb, you trying-to-be-cool buzzword compliant geeks). If another search engine is better for me, than great, I'll use it. Same goes for other products. I don't have time to waste on half-assed products just to make a point. I want to spend less time wrestling with software and more time getting things done (which translates to more time with my family). I know it's sacrilege to say so here in the geek hive, but MS products generally are better than competing products.
As to why it is common, if you recall the anti-trust trial in the U.S. where Microsoft was found guilty and the appeal where the verdict of guilty was upheld, you'll find that among the records is the fact the MSIE gained market because it was bundled with MS-Windows.
If left to compete on technical merits, MSIE will fall out of the market place and disappear. MSIE has fallen so far behind in technology, usability and security that it's a marketing wonder that any corporate intranets allow it at all. Perhaps offering a Google-like competitor is the only way to keep from losing all ground to Mozilla, Opera and others.
Microsoft could easily shut out any normal search service by further leveraging their desktop monopoly. Simply add searching functions in MSIE that make it hard to use anything than their own service, much the same way that HTTP error messages have been co-opted in MSIE.
Makers of embedded devices and other systems are quite aware of this and have been turning to Mozilla and Opera.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.