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Closing the Cover on Microsoft Book Scanning
Chris_Keene writes "The Live Search blog announces that the Live.com Book and Academic Search are to close. Book search in particular has had quite a bit of coverage, and often seemed like a race with Google. The Live blog says 'we are winding down our digitization initiatives, including our library scanning and our in-copyright book programs. We recognize that this decision comes as disappointing news to our partners, the publishing and academic communities, and Live Search users [...] this past Wednesday we announced our strategy to focus on verticals with high commercial intent, such as travel, and offer users cash back on their purchases from our advertisers.'"
there was a recent article about how MS hired a new advertising guy to help them with branding. MS's online efforts are pretty good compared to Google, but completely disorganized and not marketed properly
I R'ed the FA, but I can't work out whether this is the end of the service altogether, or whether the existing service will live on but without new books being added. Despite the jingoistic tone of the summary, the former would be bad news for everyone -- although Google's tools may be better, it's surely better to have more of this information readily available to everyone.
Either way, I think it's a disappointing climbdown for Microsoft, and surprising given how much money they've been willing to throw at previous projects that were never likely to turn a short-term profit (XBox). I'll be interested to see what the "more sustainable strategies" mentioned in the article turn out to be.
apterous.org
...verticals with high commercial intent...The reason why M$ $earch will never be competitive with Google.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I guess it's a sign of the times, but this is literally the first I've ever heard of this initiative. I ran across Google Books pretty quickly because it comes up in searches. As a very infrequent live.com search user, I never had a chance to encounter whatever content they had digitized. Oh well.
Free Conference Call -- No Spam, High Quality
In this episode of "Things MS Does Which Make No Sense"...
I agree with you, many many times MS comes across as very schizophrenic. Even on little things: how many times did they rename Vista, for example? And how about them getting into, then out of, then back into, then back out of, then etc etc the peripheral hardware market?
I really do like MS and their quality products, but geez, SO many times they come across as a company with too many people and not enough agreement internally.
Too many cooks ruin the soup, guys. Keep letting this kind of psychotic behavior go on, and you'll end up looking as bad as Teh Lunix.
Two quick queries - Ayn Rand and Science - yield no results.
:(
It's always a shame when anything book-related goes away.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
..that thinks Live academic search is actually better than the Google one? The split-pane interface is much more intuitive, you get more detail for each result, you can get the bibtex entry by just mousing over a tabbar, etc.
" this past Wednesday we announced our strategy to focus on verticals, such as shit Google doesn't do."
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Lack of choices is never a good thing.
If it's a choice between a company with a history of quality and MicroSoft, then it's inevitably worse then only having the first to "choose" from.
MS is very good at sleazy market manipulation and little else. If they get into a market, then they will drag it down. That's the only tactic they know.
In any case, not so long ago people were saying the same things about Microsoft, and look how they turned out.
I don't know anybody who ever thought MS did a good job of anything. Paid for shills like Didio and the like were happy to pump them up, but they've been a joke among the technically adept since day one.
People were saying, "Don't do that or it will get hacked in minutes" for 30 years and they still haven't learned a damn thing.
Seriously, dude, pay attention once in a while.
After enough failed ventures, all those little failures start to add up. Someday it'll dawn on them they're in Bankruptcy/Reorganization mode. They can only dawdle so long before there's really nothing left for them to do but close the doors. It wasn't so long ago that nobody imagined IBM, SGI, or Sun Microsystems would ever have any trouble. The problem with having a big company is that you passively bleed out your resources faster than a small company would. It requires big successes just to maintain the current size. If they don't choose a direction soon, they're going to stop making any gains at all and shareholders will not be happy about it.