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Ballmer On Microsoft's Search Goofs
An anonymous reader writes "AP reports on CEO Steve Ballmer's regret over Microsoft's failure to get into the search market early on. Best quote? 'I want to make sure (a user) can't get through ... an online experience without hitting a Microsoft ad.' Nice to see they're still user-oriented."
Microsoft is *the* company to maximize the user experience. It's hard to believe they won't crush Google and the competition as they did with Netscape , and the way they're handling the game console market. Look at MSN, for instance, it's a wonderfully designed website, Google can't match it. And Microsoft has Hotmail and Passport to attract users, something that Google doesn't have too. The upshot: Microsoft will win again. Good for us users!
But Microsoft is now turning its considerable might toward catching up. It's a move that puts Microsoft head to head with Google, the world's most popular Web surfing vehicle, and Yahoo, the Internet's most popular destination, in what many see as an important, growing and lucrative market. (Boldification mine)
Heh. Most popular? Nice to see that on Yahoo! News. (Although, being on yahoo may or may not have nothing to do with it since apparently it was written by an AP Business Writer)
Or maybe Yahoo! is the Internet's most popular destination, but I never knew that before. :P
I am glad that there are search engines like Google that don't annoy me with ads. I can't imagine having to ask "Clippy" the best site for pRon.
... an online experience without hitting a Microsoft ad,"
"I want to make sure (a user) can't get through
This does it for me, its time to find a new OS!
What's to keep Microsoft from just buying google? They have plenty of money to buy it thousands of times over. I hope that msn search does just fine so they'll leave my google alone.
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Well, the main problem is that Google has to make money to pay for all their services. They don't owe anyone anything for free, and ads are how many websites charge for their content. The nice thing about Google is that their ads aren't really distracting in anyway - not blocking up the page or flashing like on Yahoo or ZDnet or MSN.
I would however like an option to pay google some nominal amount to be spared ads(like I can Wunderground - $5 a year). Now I have no idea how much it costs Google to run searches, or how much they make from showing their targeted ads when you search, but if they would let you get say a yearly subscription without ads for a small amount, $5-$15, I would pay it. Or they could try something like Slashdot's system, but I find that system too messy for my tastes so I don't suscribe.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
Quality products? There's a phrase microsoft avoids like the plague.
... an online experience without hitting a Microsoft ad," he said. - Can you say "Resistance is futile"? Yeesh. I knew they though it, just didn't think they'd be so blunt about it in a public conference!
Who cares if the products are high-quality, as long as they're ubiquitous, overpriced, underdeveloped, and as long as they all leverage eachother and all the other Microsoft money machines (MSN, hotmail, etc. etc.)
That's what they care about.
If only they could do it as intelligently as Disney does it - they're the same company, they're a massive organization with countless products of all different kinds, all leveraging eachother, constantly. But you'll notice the only ads on the Disney channel are Disney ads. It's all in-network. ABC pumps Disney & their holdings constantly.
If only MS had that kind of combination of balls and business smarts - instead they just have a 100% assimilation policy.
"I want to make sure (a user) can't get through
[Z?]
If they did, we'd be rather surprised. Linux isn't a company. They have nothing to tell their users (other than `don't send your "how do i use gimp" messages to the LKML` :), they don't need advertising. Linus doesn't make money for every install. Nobody on "Linux" cares.
Now the Linux companies like IBM, Red Hat, SuSE, etc. may want you to see ads. But they aren't in the position to enforce this because they do not stuff things down their users' throats. Sure, there's the SuSE mascot all over SuSE's KDE. That's fine; that's branding. SuSE doesn't intend to make a search engine that displays SuSE ads. They aren't trying to put google out of business. Why? Because they make Linux, not search engines. M$ would probably be a good company if they just made Office (or just made Windows, but they don't really do a good job with that). Instead they try to force shit down their users' throats. That's why everyone hates you, M$.
And yes, if SuSE tried to make a search engine, web browser, media player, BIOS, mail client, office suite, etc. that all integrated and all kept me locked to their platform I'd be outraged. Wouldn't you?
My other car is first.
Which was inferior to the free Mosaic browser which the government funded.
thanks a lot bill for making the free market look so bad. Sheesh. To think of all the cool shit Bill Gates could do with 50 billion dollars. He could make robot servants or racing spaceships he could waste it all on scientific cool progress stuff. he could have changed the world and earned immortality. think about it, what would you do if you had that kind of potential? Would you proceed to make a grey and white arial fonted boring ass self advertising agency that tweaked powerpoint every couple years? hell no, hell no. I hope somebody in here is the next big programming marketing mogul, wouldnt surprise me. When you get done with that innovation and you are super rich... Do some some cool stuff with the money. I mean, by all means keep 10 mill in your sock drawer, but use the billions on robots. Space robots. Bill Gates could fund his own Nasa, and I wonder if he could have made a little money too
They'll probably release a MSN toolbar that is a feature-for-feature copy of the Googlebar, and automatically install it on the next Windows Update. Maybe on "accident" is uninstalls the original Google toolbar (Cough*netscape*Cough). Make all URL line searches and mistypes go to MSN, and remove the ability to choose your default search engine.
They don't have to make the "world's greatest," they just have to make something that is competitively passable, and is deeply hooked into their existing product line. The "Internet Search" in the file search bar is already inexorably linked to MSN...
The ______ Agenda
Many Windows users will think it's too much to type in google.com and hit enter before they do a search, so Microsoft will once again use its monopoly to ruin a great product. Just like IE. Just like Windows Media. Just like Office. Just like Windows itself.
I think you're being a little hard on users. There's a big difference between a) typing www.google.com in the address field of any browser and b) finding, downloading, installing, and configuring an alternative browser such as Netscape, Opera, Firebird/fox/whatever.
Google has also become such a part of the culture that it will be hard to disrupt. No one ever said, "Let's just netscape the web" back in the 90s. The longer MS takes to build search technology into the next version of Windows (2005, 2006, when?), the deeper Google extends into online search experiences.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
Remember when Microsoft first scoffed at the internet as a whole, and then finally got in the act with their cute little "Internet Explorer" browser? Remember how we all laughed at them, and pointed at how much better Netscape was? I mean, Netscape Navigator 3.01 vs. IE 2.0 and 3.0. Think about it... then IE did infact become the better browser. Now we finally have the new Mozilla and Firefox and while they are again superior products (I can't stand not having tabs) the game is over.
Are we now doing the same thing with search engines? It's like MS is late to the party again and we're too busy laughing at the car they came in to notice that they are eating all of our food.
Casual Games/Downloads
Is there some sort of psychological predisposition among geeks to despise marketoids? Sell sell sell, lies lies lies, bottom line is the only thing that matters -- we hates it, don't we precious?
I understand the need to sell a product and to make a living off of something but DAMN! When you're part-time freelancing web work, you tend to meet a few marketeers along the way. I did a freebie personal site for someone once who dragged a friend over to me only to ask "ok, so how do we make money off of it?" Arrrrgh!
Then there's people who don't care what kind of info they have on the site as long as it's branded and linked to something that sells.
As for Microsoft -- well, we all know their marketing department seems to overpower their quality assurance department. I guess this is part of the reason I'm not thrilled with them. I'm sure I'm not alone in this either.
So, is this thing against marketeers a manifestation of the Cathedral vs. Bazaar way of thinking? Academic information sharing vs. having to sell your soul for shoddy products?
Google runs on thousands of stripped down custom designed boxes running a custom linux os.
If microsoft bought them, they would have to essentially rebuild them from scratch, as the hardware couldnt run windows effectively, and the odds are good that windows couldnt handle the stress the way googles does. i.e. just die and hand it off, and sit there rotting.
In theory microsoft could leave it alone, but that doesnt work. Remember when they tried to convert hotmail to windows servers from bsd, and kepts screwing it up? I think they eventually managed that, but it was a mess. Now imagine converting google... it would be a clusterf**k.
Plus at that point it would just be cheaper to build their own.
Actually, if you'd read the article, that is how the quote appears in the original article text. So, this isn't Timothy's fault, but the author of the article's (ALLISON LINN, AP Business Writer).
While we're talking about that wonderfully sensationalist quote, it'd be interesting if journalists would stick to unaltered quotes (this one has been cut to appear particularly imflammatory, hence the ... (the quote probably was in full context as well, but those of us who weren't there don't get the whole quote in context, only Allison's edited version of the quote)).
I wish that journalists would put full quotes in articles without any editing to make the quotes fit with their sensationalist stories (let the stories speak for themselves, without having to guide the audience toward their conclusions (you expect that in commentary, not news)). But, then, can you trust journalist integrity when advertising dollars are at stake (as in, the advertising keeps the journalist's publication afloat, so the more sensationalist, the better)?
-Joe
If we're all god's children, what's so special about Jesus? - Jimmy Carr
OK, so Q: (not to you, to everyone). Why oh why oh why oh why doesn't Google have a "Get Firefox" link? Think about it: Google most popular search engine. Google links to Firebird, which has built-in Google search. Loads of Googlers download Firefox, love it, and stay with Google while Microsoft pushes the next IE with microsearch.com in it.
I really don't understand why they're not doing this. They'd get to keep millions of users.
MSN vs google.
What's interesting to note, is MS actually throws up a pretty useful page. Tutorials, links to the most popular distros, particularly with beginners. If someone who knew something about linux decided to search for information on it, no doubt they'd be more specific. But if one was looking for very basic information, MSN returns a very good set of links.
Google, of course the gold standard. They return 95 million results to 415. But since I wasn't going to read anywhere near 415, that is in a practical sense actually the same amount. And again, a nice page. Links mostly to the popular distros. Google does have it's news partner links, which is one up on MSN.
But looking at the MSN page, they have a little be broader view, than just distros or news to get you started. Both return good first pages, but I'd gice the edge to MSN on this one.
And Page 2.
Well MSN just stomps Google here. That first page was pretty close, mostly identical in fact. But WOW. Could I improve my proportion of relevant links in Google by killing the international sites? Sure. But really, in importance of reducing the number of steps can't be overstated.
On this metric, MSN pretty soundly beats out google. If I want generic linux info, the kind that I might want just searching for "linux" MSN is the way to go.
So shouldn't we start talking about Google's anti-linux bias?
Oh, and from my browser's about page, in the interests of full disclosure:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007
Could this actually be a prelude to including some form of adware in Windows? That would certainly fill that goal he has set for Windows users...
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
According to Alexa, Yahoo is and has been the number 1 site based on traffic, basically forever.
Buttsex.
Actually, anti-trust legislation comes from the capitalist idea that the laws governing the free market break down once a single entity gets a monopoly on that market. Of course the anti trust laws also interferes, but in a less harmful way than the powerful entity would.
Please get off of your high horse? I sometimes moderate something as interesting or another positive mod other than funny intentionally even if the comment is only funny. This is because /. chose to not count funny mods towards Karma but people will lose points for being modded down by the humor impaired.
In this way we prevent people from burning karma for being funny.
All you seem to be doing, though, is karma-whoring and not adding anything new to the discussion at hand.
Karma? What's that again?