Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft COO Warns Google Away From Corp Search
Forbes is reporting on comments made by Microsoft COO Kevin Turner, concerning the corporate search business. At a company conference in Boston, Turner referred to the enterprise search business as 'our house', and warned Google to stay out. From the article: "Those people are not going to be allowed to take food off our plate, because that is what they are intending to do ... Enterprise search is our business, it's our house and Google is not going to take that business"
Wow, a company doesn't want another company taking its business.
Jesus Zonk, why did you approve this story?
everyone at microsoft has lost far too much hair over google..
google products and servers really only even compete with a few microsoft ones, why don't they stop focusing on a competitor that they have essentially imagined and start focusing on making vista worth upgrading to
-- lol pwned
Companies, like countries, tend to talk the toughest when they're in trouble. Seeing their domains as God-given rights instead of something they had to work for, making threats they can't back up, getting into fights with much smaller competitors that it seems like they should be able to win easily but somehow can't ... Yep.
If I were a Microsoft stockholder or employee, I'd be very worried right now.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Too bad, its been around for a while too:
http://www.google.com/enterprise/
I don't get it.
Google's corporate search appliance has been around for how many years? And since when did Microsoft have a corporate search program anyway?
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Or what?
I shall taunt you?
Don't make me come over there.
Whatcha gonna do when Hulkamania runs wild on you!
Enterprise search is our business, it's our house and Google is not going to take that business
Google dominates over MSN in consumer search. Does this guy honestly think they won't dominate Microsoft in Enterprise search? Why not back up his statement with a good reason why Google won't take MS to the woodshed on this one?
Push Button, Receive Bacon
after all, if they have the better product then why should they be worried about Google ?
Isn't partitioning the market one of the things that defines illegal business tactics?
Hasn't M$ learend?
...you can't take what you already have. :)
here's what i don't get. do they (microsoft) teach their executives that the business is personal? i mean, sheesh... never before have a bunch of executives looked more like a bunch of cry-baby drama queens (and i'm no google fanboy).
a note to microsoft executives: no, google is not trying to take food off *your* plate. they are competing with you. if you can't take it, then quit and go away. the cry-baby routine is quite boring and not terribly becoming for an executive of a major international corporation.
sad robot making broken music
Hmm,
;)
Seems like the COO of an industry leading company should be more stalwart in his analysis of a market if indeed his company is the market leader. You're so much better off barely acknowledging the competition. You really shouldnt' even mention their name unless completely necessary. If he displays anything other than the facade of market leadership then it would seem to me that he's really not so sure of his market position.
Good luck to him and his company who's shares will probably be dropping in value once again.
this space intentionally left blank (oops)
Microsoft, cry me a river, build a bridge and get over it!
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
I guess there'll be Microsoft guys with chairs waiting to "totally kill" Google as their servers come into a corp search environment. Or maybe MSN Corporate, Chair Throwing Edition will clobber the server itself virtually by blocking anything from *.google.gom, silently of course. /joke
stuff |
Say it ain't so... Microsoft badmouthed Google? What's next, Dell badmouthing Apple? Oh wait...
And in related news, Microsoft announced today that CorporateSearch(tm) was being dropped from Vista.
Company I work for uses google search for everything for our enterprise.
deep with the Googleplex (or whatever it is called) deep evil laughs erupt ... but change to a Nelson haha when they remeber their motto (something to do with no evil).
With a full mouth, "Oh, that was your plate? It looked like no one touched it in a while."
Enterprise Search is Microsoft's? We didn't realize that. We're sorry. We really wanted to sell Enterprise Search services. But hey, you got dibs on it, so nevermind. Didn't mean to crowd you. Please accept our apologies.
See ya later. And don't be evil.
..."food", isn't it?
And if a whole enterprise is a piece of "food" for MS, where does that leave an individual?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Does Microsoft even have a shipping product that does this?
I will freely admit that I may just not be informed in this area - but I didn't know Microsoft even did enterprise-level search stuff. I can't recall ever seeing articles in the trade press about it either.
#DeleteChrome
"Those people are not going to be allowed to take food off our plate"
Dear god! Hide your dinner plates, or google will take to stealing the food from your childrens figurtive mouths...
This article missed his less publicized quote "Google is trying to rape our women, and eat our children, FREEEEEEEDOMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!"
You take it, I don't want it...
The effrontery! How dare you actually take MS at their word? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
If you've used MS Search then you know how EASY it would be for Google to come in and get MS out. Microsoft's search engine is a pile.
So many people are forgetting the lessons of history.
Once I used to think that MS Word would never overtake WordPerfect; that WordPerfect had too big a lead
Once I used to think that IE would never overtake Netscape; that Netscape had too much mindshare
Once I used to think that WinCE would never overtake Palm; that Palm was the perennial favorite
I've since wisened up, and will never underestimate Microsoft again.
The historical scoreboard of Microsoft versus competitors, for those to young to remember:
Looking at the current market share battles:
People will often joke about MS "Bob" - myself included. But Bob is one of very few actual Microsoft market failures. Virtually every other MS product either already dominates its field, or is projected to do so.
I'm not a Microsoft shill; far from it. I'm proud to count myself among those with the deepest disdain for the company. Currently, I am an enthusiastic Linux, KDE, OpenOffice.org, and Firefox afficianado. Before that, it was always "anything but Microsoft." As much as I'd like this to be the beginning of the end for MS, I cannot kid myself.
Look at the facts:
I'm Erwin Schrodinger and I approve of this message, and I do not approve of this message!
I thought this Kevin Turner guy was the new breed of professional manager MS imported to supersede the paranoid Gates/Ballmer "let's cut off Netscape's air supply" era.
Same as the old boss....
Every bitch out there is making excuses for Google while bashing Microsoft. They're practically the same company when it comes right down to it. Sure, MS has been around for a while but don't think Google won't be the 600 pound white elephant in 15 years.
The same way they hose over all the other competitors that they feel have something they want...Make google work slower with os tweaks and software based internet redirects through MS explorer, they already make firefox and mozilla boot up slower. Just watch IE7 and vista will work slower with google than other friendly search engines.
Blow me.
...Google founder Larry Page in a press conference said "Google is getting out of corporate search business, Microsoft COO warned us away. We are now warning Microsoft away from the OS business"
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer upon hearing this threw a chair across his office and said "Damn ! okay, Lets get out of the OS business, Google warned us away. Send a warning out to Intel to get out of the Chip making business"
Paul Otellini, pulling Intel out of its core Processor business said "Intel is looking for other high-tech sectors to enter...After issuing appropriate warning to the current market leaders of course"
What a lame story !
I normally try to avoid the Slashdot groupthink ("Apple good! M$ bad! blah blah blah") but this is one instance where ridicule is warranted.
Microsoft has NEVER owned the enterprise search space. They don't have a single corporate appliance to help search large volumes. Their search in Exchange is downright disgraceful. Personally, I won't touch their indexing service (about a month after it came out in Windows 2000, they found security holes with it. Thanks but no thanks).
If they're talking about local search, things are just as bad. Their puppy mascot takes forever to find files, and if a file is removed or deleted from the search window, explorer.exe gets freaked out and sometimes puts up an error message.
It says volumes that 3rd-party companies have an easier time finding files on Microsoft volumes than MS's own tools. I personally use Google desktop. While it can take forever to load, it finds files and emails lightning quick. If you download it, be sure to try searching in email (both using Outlook's search and Google's toolbar) -- you'll be amazed at the difference.
MS has to produce something, anything, that says their serious about search. Windows Vista is their one shot, and it's looking pretty bad. It does something from a UI standpoint I find kind of ludicrous: you open the Start Menu, type a few letters to find a program and, if it can't find it, it looks for files and then searches the web through MSN. Huh? MS put it in the Programs menu -- it should search for programs. For reference, if you use the Spotlight search feature on Mac within System Preferences, it searches just that -- System Preferences. It doesn't look for files or search the web.
"they are not taking the airport, the american dogs are turning tail and retreating! iraqi forces are victorious!"
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
...Well, "keep on worrying about stuff that does not matter anymore..." I should say. I can see one of those boxes featured here http://www.google.com/enterprise/ powering online office apps like Writely and the Google Spread sheet from an interna network usually called an intranet. Then at that moment you as Microsoft will see how Google really "eats" your lunch. In the meantime keep on whining.
...where does that leave an individual?
Calling up Google?
Is Microsoft COO Kevin Turner a baby?
Did Kevin Turner's comment "can't take food off our plate" just make some anti-trust lawyer perk up his ears? I wonder. Seems that competing for customers is OK, but actions directed at competitors just for the sake of competitive share have often been viewed as illegal - gasp. Is this what Kevin has in mind? He may some day regret saying that phrase.
Microsoft is just about to lay off a sh*tload of engineers, particularly in the Windows division.
Oops, that's inside information. If you read this, you can't buy or sell their stock.
Ok, this is really bad. "Google, that terrorist organization, threatens the American way of life because they threaten the very fabric of our economy, taking away the food from our sickly childrens' mouths." -- a really poor misquote. Please don't mod me down troll or flamebait. **trembles**
Why does MS sound like some gangster in an old movie. Can't you just see Ballmer in a dim, smokey room telling his thugs "uh, Page 'as taken my whos for the last time. He is stealing food from my family, and ain't no one gonna get away with dat. Go ice him now. I want him swimmin with fishes."
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
And in other news, I'm warning Ferrari not to take away the Aston Martin that's in my driveway. It's there. Really. Ok, so no one but me can see it, but I'm warning you, Ferrari, BACK OFF!!!
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Maybe I'm ignorant, but could somebody please define what "enterprise search" is? It seems not to have to do with databases, and I'm hard put to believe it is just "web search done for business purposes". Exactly what sort of market and technology is this about?
...ummm their house?
Does he mean LDAP using Active Directory?
Light Direct Access Protocol brought to the fore front by Novell??
And they think it provides Enterprise level search capabilities when connected to Active Directory??
If all you want is an employees account and contact information I suppose...
Uh... yeah...
It is sad when corporate spokesfolks reveal exactly how disconnected from market reality they and by extension their company vision actually is.
.. who is going to pay any attention to anything else he has to say?
Somebody get him off the stage
DO not pass GO! DO NOT collect $200!
It was better in all CAPS but the lame filter wouldn't post it.
qz
The rest of that quote reads:
"... unless, of course, their product is better than ours. In which case, they will attract new customers, together with customers from our existing customer base. Which... I guess you could call taking our business."
Honest, guv!
And I'm sure the *NIX and VMS marketplace remembers saying that Microsoft can have the desktop but _WE_ own the server room.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080487/
:)
With Murray as MS and the gopher as FOSS.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Dear Bill and Monkey-boy:
You suck at searching. We're eating your lunch. Take it like a man, or we'll slap WINE on Ubuntu and liberate your victims.
Hugs,
Google.
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
At the big company I work for, Google search powers the intranet seach engine. On the other hand, almost all of the new websites being set up are done in Sharepoint. Due to export laws, just about everything has to be password protected on a per-user basis, to be sure that no unreviewed technical information (=pretty much everything) gets inadvertantly passed on to foreign national employees (everyone with an H1B visa or even US citizen workers who work for subsidiaries based in foreign countries).
So, pretty much, our internal Google search is useless for finding any useful information, because all of the most active stuff is closed away in Sharepoint. So the google search appliance is at a disadvantage until it can support user / group ACLs and stuff.
Google could handily beat MS at enterprise search once they beat them at groupware... which shouldn't be too hard, save for MS's tight sharepoint integration with Exchange/Outlook. Fortunately, Google appears to be advancing on all these fronts, so they have their work cut out for them. But in the mean time, it looks like the MS exec has a point.
Sorry Microsoft, you must have missed the memo. SWISH-E stole your business years ago.
...use google and yahoo to search.
You should talk to my students (I'm a university professor type being anonymous for the obvious reasons). They are all (almost) convinced that they only need to learn Microsoft products and that Microsoft will Live Forever as the primary OS and application vendor in the world. Sadly, some of them are convinced that they actually know something about computers since they know how to use a Microsoft GUI. They're seriously mistaken in that.
If Microsoft has a corporate search product, I've never heard of it until now. Their past attempts at desktop search haven't exactly been spectacular either.
I have a hard time believing that someone at Microsoft said that. It really doesn't make any sense.
And do they even have a corporate search product? I know google does, but I've never heard of a corporate search Microsoft product.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
The "food" is the money that people and companies are willing to spend. If the people see that MS is not interested in the food being offered because MS has already bit off more food than it can chew then thee people will simply give the food to a company that is more hungry. Someone needs to clue MS in since it's been so long since they've had competitors and they've forgotten this.
"And if a whole enterprise is a piece of 'food' for MS, where does that leave an individual?"
An after-dinner mint.
No one could beat IBM.
A chair?
(couldn't resist)
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
If this guy doesn't get help at Charter, he should get help somewhere...
Once I turned on the WIndows Indexing Service to try it out - indexing alone only gets you so far in search results, and does that even do file content? Google Desktop works much better for searching locally, and I assume the Google search appliance would do a similarily better job of things in an enterprise setting. I have to say I've yet to be at a company that uses either, though I suppose our corp intranet search feature which never, ever finds the documents I want might be using the Windows Indexing Service.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Microsoft will buy somebody who are far ahead of Google in Enterprise search.
I bet that 1st candidate will be http://fast.no/ and it is not very expensive
(for Microsoft)
...the chair would have been enough of a warning. I guess they just didn't get the message.
http://www.google.com/enterprise/customers.html. Even NASA and US Army use it.
Corporate search technology isn't good enough. And it's not going to get good enough until it's informed by much better ontologies/taxonomies. What's more, when the required ontology/taxonomy engines and business processes finally exist, they won't just be used for search; they'll also be used for text mining, knowledge extraction, speech recognition, and so on. So far as I can tell, none of the big generalists or small linguistics specialist companies understand this point, or else the ones that do are really small and lack the resources to do anything about it.
x t-technologies-market-3-heres-whats-missing/ and related articles. The big missing piece (about the open source alternative) is coming soon, on the same site, and perhaps in my next Computerworld column as well.
The first company to break that logjam will be a huge winner, with a market opportunity comparable at least to that of, say, app servers. Unless, of course, the whole thing is just open-sourced.
I've written up most of that argument in http://www.texttechnologies.com/2005/12/11/the-te
One thing in Google's favor, however, is their internal use of knowledge extraction. They seem to really be ahead of the competition in that regard.
Meanwhile, I've got to say -- search is one of the areas where Microsoft has been saber-rattling for a long time, to little effect. Just a couple of quick examples of what I mean:
1. In 1997, I was at the Verity user's conference, and a Microsoft guy there told me how Microsoft would soon be in the business.
2. A few years ago, a woman emailed me and told me she'd just joined Microsoft, and was personally writing all of their web search algorithms.
To err is human. To forgive is good system design.
We're Not Gonna Take It!
no, We Ain't Gonna Take It!
We're Not Gonna Take It Anymore!
Error 2101: all your sig are belong to us
I swear, that company needs to be obliterated. Microsoft's arrogance is astounding.
I'm happy to see Google taking over bussiness of Microsoft. Like microsoft doesn't earn enough already.
Well, someone had to say it.
Halo 1,2 is king of the FPS games
ROFTL! But at least you didn't make the absurd claim that it beats anything..........
I've not exactly been watching the corporate search market, but the first name I would have thought of if I were looking for such a service would have been Google then Yahoo, not Microsoft.
... as much as the next person, but I think it's unfair from reading TFA to call arrogant on them.
These quotes come from a company conference - and this guy is just giving a 'rallying the troops' type speech. He's not telling Google to keep out of Enterprise searches, he's telling his own staff that they are going to (try to) keep Google out of that market (good luck!). There's a big difference.
You can be sure that at a Google company conference, Turner's counterpart is telling their staff that Enterprise searches are their right and they are going to take them from MS.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Sounds like tough talk from a COO. Though I doubt they have half the market infulence that Google has in the search space.
-Ghost
Don't quotes like this just help to inspire and motivate your competitors?
We've already seen that it is possible, in the 21st century USA, to maintain a near-monopoly; to exploit that near-monopoly by methods that are, at best, borderline legal; to be found guilty of illegal behavior; and to escape scot-free (coincidentally right after a change of administration). After all that, is it really wise to stand up tall and brag loudly about your monopoly?
More than anything, I find these remarks offensive to Microsoft's customers. Apparently they somehow belong by right to Microsoft - they are "the food on its table", destined to be Redmond-fodder regardless of their wishes. Sounds very much like the RIAA's attitude to consumers.
In fact, customers will choose the search products that are best for them, after taking all considerations into account. Microsoft's sales people are welcome to make their strongest case; then they have to let the competition do likewise, and await the decision.
To say that Google "will not be allowed" to compete with Microsoft looks dangerously like a declaration of war on the free market system to which the USA is supposedly dedicated. I only hope customers vote with their wallets, and show that they cannot be intimidated by suppliers, no matter how big and arrogant.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
When you say "it's not going to get good enough until it's informed by much better ontologies/taxonomies," do you mean that we need some kind of prior rigid ontological structure or taxonomy to provide buckets for our metadata, or do you mean we need search that is aware of the ontology of a particular "world" of documents and leverage that to improve search performance?
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
nice of Microsoft to give Google this free publicity, particularly when it makes Google seem so ... dangerous. It's even better than a million euro ad campaign
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Wikileaks, no DNS
I mean google is SO scared since they have those google appliances and all! :-)
My UID is prime is yours?
Does Microsoft even have a shipping product that does this?
Yes Microsoft offers the "Indexing Service" as of Windows 2000.
About the Windows Indexing Service
At our company we found this to provide amazingly, mind-bogglingly bad search results.
Just last month we ripped the Microsoft solution and replaced it with a Google Mini, and are in the process of evaluating an upgrade to the Google Onebox.
We are much happier with the Google system's search results.
(FYI: Even the Mini allows for you to add NTLM (Windows) user-ID's and passwords so that it can search Sharepoint sites, and other restricted access content.)
Note that Microsoft does not sell a corporate search appliance at all. A lot of barking in front of an empty house.
I don't think either company can talk about enterprise search. Both of their enterprise products are suited only to the smallest of enterprises and are not customizable enough to do much more than indexing corporate intranets. There is a lot more to it than that. Before either company claims their turf maybe they need to take a look and realize neither owns the enterprise search market right now. There are several bigger players in the market right now, FAST (www.fast.no), Autonomy/Verity (www.autonomy.com), and several others that offer way better feature sets and performance, and have much bigger market share. Forrester: http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt /0,7211,38355,00.html
A nontrivial amount (some say a majority) of search queries from the Redmond campus go to Google instead of MSN Search. So, if the Microsofties think that MSN Search sucks relative to Google, why should a random enterprise be any different?
"Your house"? Yeah, right. That was a nice assumption of the sale, Mr. Turner, but you're selling snake oil.
It's Linux, damnit! Pay no attention to renaming attempts by self-aggrandizing blowhards.
Microsoft has a COO? wow! *giggles* (sorry, couldn't resist...)
Where do you want to throw today?
My links to http://www.texttechnologies.com/ weren't just of the shameless plug variety; I really have written more there arguing the case than can realistically be repeated here. That said, if I have to choose between them I lean strongly to what you're calling a "rigid" ontology, because if the ontology is just automagically generated from each corpus, one can't build any kind of application on top of it. But what I really want is a combo; think of it as 100% of the benefits of a "rigid" ontology, plus 50% of the benefits of a fluid ontology as well.
Anyhow, to make any kind of "rigid" ontology work, it clearly has to be much more easily extensible (both by hand and as the result of automatic clustering) than ontologies are today. That's the challenge for the new product category I'm calling for.
And by the way, relying on authors to tag their documents is a non-starter. You can't even get Wall Street analysts' reports, which go through a double round of editing so as to comply with SEC regulations, accurately tagged according to the stocks mentioned in them. And that was true even BEFORE the online era, when publishing cycles were several days long. Really. It boggles the mind.
To err is human. To forgive is good system design.
the google appliance, that is... one-rack-unit high server, nice bright color, that google-indexes all your intranet sites behind the firewall.
it's been on the market for over two years.
the softies, frankly, are closing the door and bragging about how tough their locks are, after all the horses got out of the barn.
next thing you know, the softies will be warning everybody that they cannot duplicate color TV because MS has discovered they can digitize the signals.
be. very. afraid. NOT.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Is he talking about indexing services?
I don't get it, Microsoft don't even provide a worthy competitor to Autonomy, Google etc. corporate searches? Unless he considers indexing services to provide that role, I think he's on his own there though.
Nothing costs nothing
... that I often have to use google to track down an MSDN or Knowledgebase article that Microsoft can't find on their own website. Google does a much bettter job of genrating a complete and accurate index of MSDN than Microsoft does!
Turner referred to the enterprise search business as 'our house'
I'm picturing a Microsoft meets Underarmor commercial in the works... We must protect this house!
Rucker
you know, "COO" sounds just like "cu" in Brazil, which means, literally, "asshole".
:)
yay! on more funky foreign dirty word for you americans to have fun with...
I don't feel like it...
A duck!!! Burn the witch!!!!!
(neither could I)
If you must!
Some of us here made percieved this simple salvo exchange as an outrageous scandal. In fact, it is very simple PR announcement:
Microsoft sees business customers as own primary income source, Google steps in on the market and challenges Microsoft, Microsoft declares that Google's gauntlet is now picked up. A little chest-thumping from Microsoft, that's all.
The issue is not whether Microsoft thinks they are "entitled" to this market. The issue is whether they have the capability to prevent Google from "taking food off their plate". In a competitive world, that's all that matters.
The lazy giant takes a long time to roll over.
We have had a Google Search Appliance
in house for over two years now.
Microsoft's Kevin Turner is just figuring
out that there is competition out there.
When did MS start corporate search?
I have never heard of it, but then why would I.
IMHO MS thinks all your computers are belonging to us.
I admit, I haven't been in an "enterprise" environment on a day-to-day basis since 2003 ... but my recollection is wishing that SOME company would go into enterprise search, because MS search tools ...
sucked.
Enterprise search -- can't help this -- I do recall "Star Trek" episodes in which things aboard ship that were missing (or not supposed to be there at all) took forever to find ...
Kevin proceeded to inform Google that his 'ass is grass' and that he should 'meet me at the flagpole at 3:30! I've got a dentist appointment at 4.' Google replied with a very firm, 'oh yeah!?', to which Kevin stuck back 'yeah!', with a swift nudge to Google's chest. Both boys were then escorted to the principles office and had to be picked up by their mothers. I'm told that they both received a very stern talking to. Kevin missed his dental appointment.
In Soviet Russia these Soviet Russia jokes aren't considered the least bit amusing...
PS: Oh I forgot to add.
It's MS that drove us to Googles big yellow Linus box
for indexing our web pages. Yes It's the Google
software that lets us index the the Ugly MS-word and
MS-power-point files. If it where not for that I would
be using ht://dig.
Thanks MS for feeding Google.
Want to bet the Parent was writen by a MS employee?
Yep.
Microsoft has some plans for WinFS technologies they aren't talking about yet. See http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1982419,00.as p. An 'integrated storage vision' for leveraging structured and unstructured data? Sounds like Enterprise search to me. If Turner made his statements at that company conference post-WinFS announcement, maybe he had this in mind.
I love Microsoft, but I thought they were dead. I mean yes they were still shipping half assed products but their news was all press releases.
However it's good to see Microsoft is back to complaining about others entering into areas of development that they only entered into likely because they bought a company already in that field. The beauty is instead of making their product better, finding ways to enhance the value of their product, or develop a stronger backbone, they complain about their competition.
Jesus, imagine someone who is pissed off because someone moved into their field offering a similar product. Now microsoft didn't do that with Win 95, ripping of Macs OS, nor are they doing it again with Vista, which looks a lot like OSx, only with out the useful unix backend. MSN certainly wasn't trying to grab some search engine area away from other companies like excite. Microsoft certainly hasn't tried to rip away sony or nintendo's marketshare in the video game industry. But if they did, they certainly have done extremely well in japan (50,000 xbox 360s from what I heard).
This is a company who basically has constantly ripped ideas from other companies, and gone into areas to compete with other big names, but every time something tries to do it again, they throw a tantrum and use their might to try to force them out (linux/windows, firefox/IE, any good media player(MPC)/Windows media player) It's just good to see them up to their old "tricks".
Be careful Google. Microsoft is heavily armed with office chairs and it knows how to use them! /sorry
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
Google has raised advertising to such a fine art, that now their competitors advertise their products for them. Or maybe Microsoft is just good at that, after all it was Microsoft's Halloween memos that turned many people on to Linux.
...or alternatively just in specified file types:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309173
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/tips/xp_bad_search.htm
I provide this merely as useful information, I'm not trying to defend Microsoft.
"I think The Ballmer was like that long before google. For him, I think Google has elevated his blood pressure to near coronary levels."
Your use of the word "coronary" assumes that Ballmer has a heart. Could you please post any evidence of that? Everything I've seen indicates that he is habitually adversarial, like Bill Gates. Has he ever done anything motivated by kindness? The sloppiness of Microsoft's products wastes the time of millions of people, for example.
Excellent point. But the point can be taken further:
Countries, like companies, tend to talk toughest when they're in decline. The U.S. government has invaded 24 countries since the Second World War, killing people and destroying their property.
If you look around, it is more than a few organizations in decline. We are experiencing a wholesale cultural breakdown.
It is also good to remember that Forbes Magazine is owned by Steve Forbes, and Steve Forbes is a socially backward man with the past you would expect of someone whose father was rich. Here is the second Google link to a search on "Steve Forbes": Steve Forbes' Skeleton Closet
Here is the first Google search result: Steve Forbes. Remember, he ran for president of the United States.
What is written in Forbes Magazine is valuable because it is an example of how rich people think. The only thing that matters to them is their own unbalanced ideas. When I say "rich people", I'm not talking about the condition of having a lot of money. I'm talking about the condition of being psychologically unbalanced by a lot of money.
This particular Forbes article is an example of the stream of consciousness of the kind of people who have almost no inner principles except that money is important, and of the kind of people who work for them and who have adopted their view of life.
The author of the article, Parmy Olson, is "an Assistant News Editor at Forbes.com", it says.
Microsoft pitching a hissy fit about someone possibly taking "food off their plate"?
Microsoft, the company who built its business on destroying the competition, upset that someone might touch a market they claim to own?
It's hysterical!
And for the record, Microsoft has not one iota of our enterprise search business. Not one.
Google CEO Eric E. Schmidt has been hospitalized after being struck by a chair in a drive-by chairing. Witnesses said the assailant was heard screaming "I'll f***ing kill Google!" before popping out of an SUV and launching a chair at Schmidt. The assailant was reported to have yelled "you best keep out our food, you in our house now" before driving off in a loud screech. Suspect Microshizzle CEO Steve Ballmer has only commented, "the big bad wolf has come to blow down their house of cards" and was unavailable for further comment. /me ducks
What they need to do is start taking out/kidnapping executives and VIPs ala New Rose Hotel and subsequent William Gibson stories. That would make competition interesting. And it would give me even more excuses to carry that razor sharp san-mai L6 bainite wakizashi I've been polishing.
Have you noticed that you never see Monseur Creosote and Ballmer in the same place at the same time?
Coincidence? I THINK NOT!
Its interesting that when MS goes into a new area they (MS) lable it fair competition, and use all the money and tactics - lgal and otherwise - to eliminate the other players. Now a serious competitor appears in one of their favourite areas, they cry foul.. MS, you are no better than the schoolyard bullies that I have seen in the last 25 years. If you reallly believed you were the best, you would welcome competition, because you would really be able to prove that your are in fact the best, and it would drive you on to improve your product.
Developers .. (repeat x184 times)...
= Grow a brain...
nothing that Microsoft has ever done has been worth anything,
That's a bit vague. Perhaps you can be a bit more specific in what you think were original worthwhile contributions by Microsoft products. I mean, even Vista was entirely derivative before it was cut back, and now it's little more than a service pack.
Bill Gates is evil.
In the sense of being a ruthless, convicted monopolist, yes. We've seen the Emails, and we've seen the judgements.
I don't see it happening. The reality that an ontology attempts to explain is changing, and those who reflect on it change, and thus the experience cannot be canned like a taxonomy. Tell me how good an ontology can get, for example, at helping someone find music they will like? Pandora.com is trying as hard as they can, but it takes more effort to tweak a Pandora "station" than our Hoi Polloi will tolerate. The thing is: everything on the web has some of the same qualities as the music problem for Pandora.
Ontologies must be disposable and cheap, IMHO.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
In a startling retort to MS's warning not to start a "Corporate Search Engine" Google announces today they're starting a corporate searchengine, in beta, for the next 5 years of course, next tuesday! (faux report)
What makes these comments funny is that neither Google, nor Microsoft own Enterprise Search. The "big" players in Enterprise Search are Autonomy and FAST. Google has a small part of the market and Microsoft has a minuscule part of it. Enterprise Search is about a lot more than HTML search. Taxonomy, Faceted Search, multiple data sources, multiple file types, and other heterogenous environmental issues are at the core of enterprise search. The real "threats" in this market place are the database vendors. Microsoft has a dog in that hunt, as does IBM and Oracle. If they ever get data warehousing working well, then there is no need for a enterprise search engine.
First time I encountered the cpu eater (indexing service) was when we installed Office 97 on Windows 95 or 98, I cant remember.
OFfice installer never told you about it and it ate up your computer all the time, even screwing up CD burns. Took a while to figure out what was going on under that version of windows.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
I agree that an ontology isn't a recommendation tool (although it might play a useful role in a collaborative filtering app, if that app happened to, for example, deal with relatively unstructured text).
But so what? My new car isn't very good at carrying things from the kitchen to the bedroom, but that doesn't keep it from meeting a broad range of my other transportation needs.
To err is human. To forgive is good system design.