Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Microsoft Releases Toolbar Suite

Posted by timothy on from the pretty-soon-it-will-be-a-trend dept.

Philipp Lenssen writes "Microsoft today released the MSN Toolbar Suite Beta. This brings true desktop search to Windows (for those who don't have Google Desktop Search or similar software running already) and also includes features like search term highlighting in web pages, auto-completing of forms, and a pop-up blocker."

31 of 476 comments (clear)

  1. Bundled Soon? by fembots · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Who wants to bet that this suite is going to be bundled in the next Windows? It's pretty easy for them to integrate this toolbar into any Windows-apps like IE, Outlook, calendar etc since they also happen to write the OS.

    I always maintain that the majority of users don't know they have a choice, hence they're using/starting/opening whatever that's been thrown at them.

    It's quite convenient for MS to sit and see what works, then create their own, and with their dominance in desktop OS, they can easily claim a huge chunk of the desktop-suite market share overnight.

    It wouldn't be as easy for its online search service because that requires users to go there, thus opens up the "choice" perspective.

    --
    Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
    1. Re:Bundled Soon? by fupeg · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Next Windows? You mean Longhorn in 2006? How about an update to Windows XP? Especially now that SP2 makes most people turn on auto-update... They could just slip this in one night while you're sleeping.

    2. Re:Bundled Soon? by wastingtape · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's quite convenient for MS to sit and see what works, then create their own, and with their dominance in desktop OS, they can easily claim a huge chunk of the desktop-suite market share overnight.

      Seems to work though wouldn't you say? I think a lot of business models are fashioned after low-risk investments. If someone else has already done the R&D why not "borrow" some from them? A good examples of positive externalities.

      Actually, as you mentioned, integration with all of MS's tools is probably great... for people who use them. Devaiting from the norm has it's consequences however. Running SquirrelMail as your primary mail client you rarely get support like this (heck i can't even click a mailto: link and have a window open up). It's all good for ma and pa Dell Windows XP machine.

    3. Re:Bundled Soon? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      "I always maintain that the majority of users don't know they have a choice, hence they're using/starting/opening whatever that's been thrown at them."

      I think this every time I see a new HP, Dell, or Gateway. Straight out of the box there are so many tasks running that even the fastest hardware is struggling to work quickly. And almost all the users of these machines don't realize that they have a choice. So the computers muck on, while their users complain about speed and spend money on upgrades... /off topic

      I don't like this toolbar idea all that much. It's a set of features for which there are many alternatives out there, and if users want/need them, they can go find them. Putting all these features in one place is overkill.

    4. Re:Bundled Soon? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Meh...

      Apple bundles everything they can think of with their OS. And the people love it. MS used to do that, and the people loved that too. That's just the way it is.

      Of course, choice is just that. Choice. If I choose to be a monoculture using desk-jockey, what makes you right and me wrong about my software preferences?

    5. Re:Bundled Soon? by EnderWiggnz · · Score: 2, Insightful

      in general, you are right - the "first movers" with a technology rarely win, and their competitors quickly copy any successful initiative.

      this, in normal situations is healthy.

      however, when one company has a monopoly on a good or service, they can then leverage that monopoly to extend their hold on the market. like integrating a browser, or designing your own rail cars...

      or, adding a desktop toolbar.

      --
      ... hi bingo ...
    6. Re:Bundled Soon? by 1u3hr · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But the computer and electronics industry tends to confirm the first mover advantage:

      Microsoft - first microcomputer software company
      Intel - first microprocessor company
      Oracle - first reliable and commercial RDMS company
      AOL - one of the original online services
      Xerox - first photocopier company
      Sony - first widespread transistor radio company

      You've got to be joking. That just shows that the real first movers have been wiped from the public mind.

    7. Re:Bundled Soon? by Paradise+Pete · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Microsoft first microcomputer software company?? No.. IBM maybe.

      Micro-Soft was the first commercial software company for microcomputers. And one of Bill Gates', sorry, "William Henry Gates III" first official acts was to send a whiney letter complaining about people not paying up for his BASIC interpreter.

    8. Re:Bundled Soon? by gardyloo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No, I've never heard of CP/M; I'll look it up. Which I've just done, and although it may not exactly support MY standpoint, it in no way supports yours. http://www.maxframe.com/CPM.HTM has a quick synopsis.
      What, then, is a "first mover"? According to http://searchcio.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid 19_gci509397,00.html , "In the business world, a first mover is a company that aims to gain an advantageous and perhaps insurmountable market position by being the first to establish itself in a given market."

      Now, I'm the last person to assert that if a company, paradigm, orgamism, WHATEVER has an advantage, or even a HUGE advantage over its competitors, that it's ALWAYS going to be on top; "insurmountable" is never, or rarely, literally that. However, very few people are going to argue with Microsoft's huge dominance of software these days, or with Intel's position in microprocessors (embedded ones, too). You may argue with the fact that some of the companies in the list were actually not the VERY first to go into their respective markets (but some of them were!); however, as my links show, the companies were, in many cases, the first to popularize their technologies, and popularizing, whether through advertisement, word-of-mouth, or even by locking the market onto whatever "standard" you're working on is just as important as having a truly useful, innovative product (fortunately or unfortunately).

      I apologize for the term "knee-jerk reaction" I used in my original posts, and realize that you have some good points. However, in your first post you gave no evidence to back up your "insight", which was, essentially, that the winners get to write the history books. I have the feeling that we'll not agree on these points, but thank goodness the internet is anonymous, eh? And truly, debates, even dumb ones, make life interesting. :)

    9. Re:Bundled Soon? by nelsonal · · Score: 3, Insightful

      First mover advantage is very important in markets with network effects (ebay is the best example I can think of) in which the first guy there has a very valuable advantage by getting there first. The advantage is conferred by lower costs than later competitors to create their business network because the network they create is more valuable the more users it has. Later competitors (think about how little business there was on uBid or Yahoo auctions) must spend more per user than the initial competitor as their network is less valuable. Once eBay got the first million users it became considerably more difficult for uBid to sign up their 10,000th in then ebay had signing up its 10,000th user.
      MS dominance was a result of being a first mover, but not in the way you think. Bill and Co were the first to figure out that application development had network effects and as a result courted application developers better than their earlier peers.
      Intel has considerably less first mover advantage, if anything they achieved some advantages in manufacturing which allowed them to cover any other missteps by out investing their compeitors in down cycles (when AMD is attempting to remain solevant in a big downturn, Intel is building the next gen fabs.
      AOL has never been anything except a stock scam that continued until they bought half of a real company.
      Oracle built a natural monopoly (as did Veritas, Intuit, BEA and almost every other software company) but first mover was not the reason. Software is a natural monopoly because there is only room for a single competitor (two competitors are less efficient than a single one in software development) being first made little difference being the first to get bigger than any compeitors was crucial. If anything I'd say Oracle is experiencing rents to Larry's pursuasive selling of relational databases better than any competitors, and they probably would have won even if Informix had been offering RDBMS first. Development costs are fixed so the company with the most users has a lower production cost (which is why MS is terrified of the increasing vibrance of the linux development community). To many management gurus (stock shills) whove never heard of industrial organization attempt to use very specific technical terms to mean things they were never intended to mean. Pets.com was not operating in a business that conferred any advantage to the first mover (that couldn't be replicated as easily by a later competitor). Amazon got a tiny amount of first mover advantage from the free media coverage by being the only dotcom most media companies did stories on. Although there was no lack of coverage of B&N's entry to online marketing.

      --
      Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
    10. Re:Bundled Soon? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Yeah and when you're responsible for several thousand desktops just slaping stuff together like that with no testing is what makes the job so exciting!

  2. Ironically... by wasted · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The toolbar claims to block annoying popups, but the most annoying pop-up on my work computer (where I am forced to use Internet Exploder) is the one that says I have Active X disabled.

    1. Re:Ironically... by urlgrey · · Score: 3, Insightful
      I wish there were a:
      "Please don't show me this error message ever again for any reason whatsoever even if it's a life threatening situation. Ever. Really. I mean it. I'm sure."
      checkbox and button combo for that.
      --
      Running 'Nix is like owning a Lightsaber. It's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized time."
  3. What's the big deal? by 77Punker · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Windows includes a search function. IE with SP2 blocks popups. IE has been auto-completing things for a while, too. I don't understand why Microsoft made this. Even if the features are improved in the toolbar, shouldn't they have just improved the backend and just distribted it via Windows Update?

  4. target audience? by Poleris · · Score: 3, Insightful

    so... who here is actually going to use this? no one?

    so that means it's targetted to a less technically-adept audience, right? how is microsoft going to make them aware of the advantages of this toolbar? package it with softwar? a giant marketing campaign?

    this thing doesn't look like it's going to be a huge success.

    1. Re:target audience? by FlipmodePlaya · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I believe IE's default homepage is msn.com, and therefore the page millions of people see when they open their browser. They could simply advertise it on that...

    2. Re:target audience? by ziggy_travesty · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'm going to use it, along with many other people who haven't felt compelled to switch to Firefox.

      I plan to uninstall the Google Desktop Search and install this, as I'm sure it will work just as well (the search technology comes from Lookout Software) and now I'll have search term highlighting (which wasn't in SP2).

      So Microsoft releases cool utilities that will help people who won't/can't upgrade to SP2 and Slashdot pans them. I really should stop reading opinions, but morbid curiosity gets the best of me every day.

  5. Desktop Search? by ikkonoishi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Like what should have been in an OS from the start?

  6. nice job guys by VAXGeek · · Score: 4, Insightful

    See, even Microsoft gets to say ME TOO sometimes.

    Future predictions for Windows features:

    Expose
    Tabbed Browsing in IE out of box
    Rendezvous
    Dashboard

    --
    this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
    1. Re:nice job guys by generic-man · · Score: 2, Insightful

      As opposed to Apple innovation, which has touted such advanced features as

      Fast User Switching, just two years after Windows XP introduced it.

      Video conferencing, which Microsoft introduced years ago with NetMeeting.

      File extensions, once they realized that not everyone on the Internet uses a Mac.

      Support for zip files in Finder without the need for third-party shareware, years after Microsoft supported them in Windows ME.

      Mac OS X has many useful features, but don't start claiming that Apple only innovates and Microsoft only copies. Nobody's hands are clean there.

      #include <xerox.rant.h>

      --
      For more information, click here.
  7. Am I the only one wondering... by Silverlancer · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Why they have a popup blocker built into the toolbar? Isn't Internet Exploder supposed to have one already?

  8. Re:Popup blocker? by Stormwatch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    > Why would they put another one in
    > (besides bringing popup blocking
    > to earlier versions of Windows)?

    That could be a huge reason: to keep people with older Windows from adopting the "other" way to block popups... *cough*Firefox*cough*

    --
    Circumcision is child abuse.
  9. Re:Google toolbar for Firefox by AstroDrabb · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Informative? Exactly what is the point of this toolbar? Firefox 1.0 has had built-in Google search for ages and you can add _tons_ of other searches to the toolbar at the click of a button. Searches like Dictionary.com, Amazon, Bible searches, recipe searches, tech searches, shopping, you name it, it is there, hundreds of search engince.

    Popup blocking? Uh, Firefox has had that for _ages_. There are currently 175 extension to Firefox 1.0 covering everything from web development to bookmark sync, games, you name it. Who would install _any_ Firefox toolbar from some .com site? It is just probably some tracking code.

    --
    If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
    it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
  10. OSX by be11o · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It occurs to me I have been able to do this with OSX on my powerbook for years

    --
    There are 10 types of people in the world, those who know binary and those who do not!
  11. how long til hackers hack it? by p51d007 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I wonder how long it will be until hackers find a hole that will allow them access inside this?

  12. Microsoft is doomed. by rindeee · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't say this as an anti-MS zealot or anything. It's just that I've noticed over the past two years Microsoft has gone from a market leader to an almost purely reactive organization. It's amazing to see a company go down hill that quickly.

    1. Re:Microsoft is doomed. by mrchaotica · · Score: 2, Insightful

      So, how's Palladium going?

      See, that's the thing -- regardless of how good their future projects might be, Microsoft needs to die. It's not about the quality of their software, it's about control. It seems to me that Microsoft is bent on controlling everything it gets involved in, and when the stuff it's involved in is information itself, that's unacceptable.

      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

  13. Re:'desktop search' functionality? by TildaBang · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I have in on my taskbar just fine. There was an option at the end of the install that asked if you wanted to have it automatically enable it. Of course the IE bar should default to searching the web, and not the computer. Just as the taskbar search should default to your computer... which it does by the way. See that icon in your taskbar? Try right clicking on that to see if you can get it to index. It's probably not doing it because you're using the computer. It's not greedy with CPU. Overall, i'm not too impressed with your review. You clearly do not read anything during the install, check out the program options, or read the plenty of available help topics on the web and in the program. Not impressed in the least.

  14. Re:So Basicially... by Belsical · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Have you actually tried it? It could be better than the Google toolbar. For instance, I've noticed that it keeps track of items being moved around in Outlook a lot better. I also like its Advanced Query Interface.

    How about it not turning your computer into a web server? It took me an unreasonable amount of time to install the Google toolbar because of my firewall settings; this was a breeze (Google still says it won't work on my computer whenever I start up, even though it does).

    As I compare the two, they seem to each have their pros and cons. Like any other decision regarding which piece of software to use, I'd imagine it will depend on the user...or users will use both.

    --

    "There are no such things as mutual fantasies. Yours bore us and ours offend you."
    - Bill Maher
  15. Re:Well this is slashdot by RzUpAnmsCwrds · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "but in this case Google and Apple got to the market first with a product MS promised "

    Google perhaps, but remember:

    TIGER HAS NOT SHIPPED

    I love people who comparine a publicly-available Microsoft product to an Apple product that is not publicly available and proclaim that Microsoft is "copying" Apple.

    Repeat after me:

    * Microsoft announced WinFS *before* Apple announced Tiger

    * MSN Desktop search can be downloaded TODAY. Tiger is only available to developers.

    * WinFS IS NOT Spotlight.

  16. Microsoft's power is programming by musicmaster · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Microsoft has always been a nerd company. Their books about how to program and do a project are famous. Their organisation is top. Their people are top. They don't have the fast-growing shares and organisation of the past, but they are still very attractive.

    They are weak on new ideas - they have always been. But when they take over an idea they do it with a perfectionist zeal that usually sooner or later leaves the competition in the dust.

    At the moment they have a defensive period in which they have to invest much in making their products more secure. This won't bring them much money, but sooner or later they will find a new markets to grow in.

    I still hope that some day a company will make a toolbar that offers cards, emoticons and all the other gadgets that seduce people to install those nasty adware products.