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Does Bing Have Google Running Scared?
suraj.sun alerts us to an anonymous-source story up at the NY Post, not what we would normally consider a leading source of tech news, claiming that Microsoft's introduction of Bing has alarmed Google. "...co-founder Sergey Brin is so rattled by the launch of Microsoft's rival search engine that he has assembled a team of top engineers to work on urgent upgrades to his Web service, The Post has learned. Brin, according to sources..., is himself leading the team of search-engine specialists in an effort to determine how Bing's crucial search algorithm differs from that used by [Google]. 'New search engines have come and gone in the past 10 years, but Bing seems to be of particular interest to Sergey,' said one insider, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The move by Brin is unusual, as it is rare these days for the Google founders to have such hands-on involvement in day-to-day operations at the company, the source added." CNet's coverage of the rumor begins with the NY Post and adds in Search Engine Land's speculation on what the world of search would look like if Yahoo exited the field.
Nothing to see here, move along...
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
How the article paints it (and what sells newspapers):
... but sir, what about the 20% of the time they get to work on their own projects ...
... *ahem* users that left us for Bing. You know some video widget or bell or whistle or some such crap. Those users'll be back anyway.
Google Drone: *bursts through the office doors* Fuhrer Brin, Fuhrer Brin! I've news that Microsoft's Bing service is gaining on us!
Sergey Brin: JesusChristJesusChristJesusChrist what're we gonna do?! Oh god oh god, we are so fucked! *kicks over his desk and gets up to pace wildly about the room* Why is there no coke on this goddamn coffee table when I need it?!
Google Drone: *empties a baggy of cocaine onto the polished marble table and starts cutting lines* We need action now, sir.
Sergey Brin: *inhales a long line and rubs his hands all over his face* Ok, ok, I got it. Get every able bodied person on 24/7 shifts for the next month working to make our service better.
Google Drone: Bu
Sergey Brin: SCREW that, we have an emergency. Get me everyone in the auditorium now, we ain't leavin' until the Google main search page is shitting rainbows and making the users feel like unicorns!
What's really happening:
Google Drone: *walks calmly into Brin's hermetically sealed chamber* Here's the reports for competitors, sir. It looks like Bing may have established itself as a competitor with Yahoo! but it's too early to tell.
Sergey Brin: *steeples his fingers and lets out a long calm calculated sigh* Great, another trivial nuisance to keep an eye on -- well I didn't get this far by ignoring things. Ok.
Google Drone: I'll put them on the big board, sir.
Sergey Brin: Good but be sure not to put them on the buyout dart board, they're not an option.
Google Drone: Yessir, anything else, sir?
Sergey Brin: Yes, round up the boys in the rec room that seem to have so much free time lately and see if they can brainstorm up an optional beta prototype we could throw on our page to win back the morons
My work here is dung.
Boy CNet is trolling for news. There have been a lot of competitors in the search space. Most of them failed to make a dent because their search algorithm weren't better. Unless Microsoft licensed google's algorithm, the only thing Bing has is an outlook-like interface. Doesn't matter how you dress a pig, it's still a pig.
Your competitor releases a product, you analyse it. That simple.
When I worked at VMware we analysed every VirtualPC release both before and after Microsoft acquired it. There was a checklist of VMware "innovations" which we had metrics to measure how well VirtualPC didn't stack up against.
If you don't do this, you don't know why your product is better than your competitor's, and so you don't know how to compete with them. Unless, of course, you're like Microsoft and think "compete" means "lie".
How we know is more important than what we know.
I've only used Bing twice. Once when i heard about it on slashdot and then again after I saw a commercial... thought i'd give it another try. Other then a decent marketing campaign, Bing just doesn't have any new and exciting features that I like and that Google doesn't already have. Google does what I need so I'll continue using it.
And Seinfeld falls into this statement where exactly?
Being scared may be just the motivation they need to keep innovating, and potentially culling some more fat. They dropped notebook and some other services last year, which, while a bit crappy for those of us using those services, was probably ultimately a good move which freed resource to be better spent elsewhere.
As we're all fond of saying, MS tends to get things right on the third try (or just eventually). MS themselves got scared enough a few years back to actually put together a good search engine this time. Yeah, it took them awhile, but they've got a decent chance of becoming a good alternative to Google again. I've used Bing as my main search system for about 4 days after launch, and it was fine. I find myself alternating between google and bing about once per day now.
What if MS was able to use Bing to get back to a 30-40% search market share in the next few years? That would certainly change the dynamics of the search field again, and I think it would be changed for the better.
creation science book
Google is Kleenex. You don't even really care that your wife bought Puffs. You'll still call them Kleenex and 9 out of 10 times you're going to pick them first by name. This simply isn't going to go the way of a meme. People aren't just going to jump ship in droves because it's different and not nearly as convenient. Start worrying when the numbers start talking. Getting excited about ANYTHING Microsoft does online is beyond premature. Hell, it might be IM-mature technologically speaking.
This is how market competition is supposed to work.
Evil or not, a Google without competition inevitably stagnates.
Whether or not the story is true, competition - even from the likes of Microsoft - competition in the search market is a good thing to have. Google has been been without serious competition in the web search market for almost a decade, and there are definitely ways they can improve the quality of their results.
Two things that most people will want avoided are 1) feature-bloat rather than basic s/n improvement as the method of competition, and 2) unfair use by microsoft of its (diminished) OS monopoly. Both these things were seen in the browser wars, and it took 5 years (more or less) for browser software to recover from that fiasco.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
The word "best" does not mean "good", in this context it means "everything else [Microsoft does] is even worse"
I know this might shock the US crowd, but the rest of the world exists too, and nobody told Microsoft while they were developing Bing's neat features. So what happens is, that all those interesting little local search and filter things are useless to everyone else and winds just winds up being Live Search with new branding.
I like the concept of the filters but they only work for a very small selection of US centric pre-selected results. In fact if it isn't on MSN.com it doesn't seem to exist as far as Bing is concerned.
So bing is meh, it was an interesting demo but just wasn't developed enough to be a real product. Google's unfiltered results are still much better than Live Search.
Just a few random searches will prove that google brings back more relevant results. I'm actually surprised people are still talking about it.
Any self-respecting organization will take a close look at a competitor product, specially when such competitor happens to be one of the world's largest player in the industry.
Bing will certainly snatch a fraction of the market share owned by Google; modern top management theories demand that Google determines whether the market share lost to the rival will be a single user or a more considerable fraction.
It is not about Sergei pissing his pants, but about him and his company designing a solid strategy to respond to their competitor's move.
Aeroespacio.org
When I first heard about Bing I laughed at the thought of people actually dropping tried and trusted Google for some kind of Microsoft re-branded Windows Live Search, then I started paying closer attention to what I was actually getting when I searched on Google.
Over the last several years I thought it was my imagination or increasing impatience that has caused my increased dissatisfaction with Google's search results but when I think about it more closely pagerank has been around for a long time and it hasn't altogether changed much. With pagerank basically being synonymous with Internet presence there has been a ton of research into gaming the algorithm and finding ways to artificially boost your website's relevance and this has basically resulted in the increasing decline of Google's search results over the last several years.
Just as an actual example I was looking into buying a guitar amp online I had heard about and I wanted to find a website I had been to before on another computer that had a database clips demoing various amps and other guitar gear but I couldn't remember the name. After getting frustrated with several Google searches yielding nothing but trash for the obvious search queries, I turned to Bing because I thought it might be worth a laugh. First result was the website I wanted from the beginning, and that pains me a lot as someone who hates most of Microsoft's products as much as anyone else around here.
as it is rare these days for the Google founders to have such hands-on involvement in day-to-day operations at the company,
Because the party is on the plane, and not in the office?
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Microsoft drones doing a "Microsoft product is good" ad campaign, just that using that plain words they said "Even competition thinks that is good".
Of course that if some competitor does a big fanfare move Google should be concerned, and see if what looks as pure vapor have some smoke in there, as if something is being cooked there. Is it just aesthetics? There were some prizes recently for photographical iGoogle themes. But if is something more complex than that, and if not covered by some of the weird Labs testing runnings, a better understanding on that is required.
I agree.
"Taking notice" might be an apt phrase to describe Google's reaction -- but even "concern" would be seriously overstating it -- never mind something like "panic" or "running scared".
Having said that, it's nice to see some competition in search, just as it's nice to see Macs and Linux keeping Windows honest.
And Seinfeld falls into this statement where exactly?
Churro sales went through the roof after that commerical aired.
I want one right now.....it still works.
I wonder how much Slashdot got from that "massive marketing budget" TFA speaks of. There is nothing else of value in there.
I have been using Bing for the last few weeks and comparing with Google by running the same queries on both.
At it's launch, there was considerable difference in the results of the two (Google giving far more relevant results). But Bing has been rapidly improving and now I get pretty much identical results from both.
Bing is a huge improvement over Yahoo at least for general queries.
It's a pity that Safari (at least on Mac) doesn't allow any other search engine except Google. That is just plain mean.
Microsoft does marketing better than everything else they do? I don't buy it. Embrace Extend Extinguish comes to mind for starters. I'd say their ability to control the markets they are in is also more effective than their marketing. I'm sure there's more if i cared to keep going. There's a reason we've seen so many anti-trust lawsuits against them, and it isn't because they are great at marketing. I'd even venture that if what they were "best" at was marketing, they wouldn't be the target of so much hatred and scandalous news we hear of every other day at slashdot.
Microsoft is doing what it's best at - Marketing
but but... that's exactly what the advertisement business is all about! It hasn't been about "search" in a long long time (not since maybe 2003 or so when Google's search results started to suck).
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
This morning, our dear leader Steve Ballmer is unveiling our completely new search service, that has Google absolutely shitting its pants, unrelated to anything we at Microsoft have ever done before: Bob Hope.
We spent lots of time listening to you, except when you told us how much MSN Search^W^WLive Search^W^WKumo sucked 'cause youâ(TM)re just wrong about that, to learn which buzzwordy Web 2.0 thingies you use search for today. Finding a webpage that has anything to do with the search terms you entered is so passe, dahling.
So today we're introducing a new kind of search, that goes beyond traditional search engines that do tedious things like find stuff, to instead help you make faster, more informed decisions. (Windows 7 is peachy keen, by the way.) We think of Bob Hope as a Decision Engine. We've sued Stephen Wolfram into atomic dust using our patents on FAT and Mono, co-opted the Wolfram Alpha engine and swapped Mathematica for Visual Basic and Wolfram's brain for the exhumed corpse of Bob Hope.
So why did we pick Bob Hope as the new core of our search? We needed a brand that was as fresh and new as our approach. A name that was memorable, short, easy to spell, and that would function well as a URL around the world.
And just look at these results!
What do we want?
Braaains.
When do we want them?
Braaains.
What do I need to run Windows 7?
Braaains.
What's Bill Gates got that means you should buy everything you can from the company he founded?
Braaains.
What's the final proof of Steve Ballmer's equal genius to Steve Jobs?
Vistaaa.
This is something new, something improved! You need to try it! It'll give so much more betterer results than that other search engine we can't name because Steve will wedge another chair up our butts! Please, come and try our new and improved service! FOR GOD'S SAKE TRY THE DAMN SERVICE. OR THE PUPPY GETS IT. We're Microsoft. We're serious as a heart attack on this one.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Maybe because SEOs aren't targeting Bing yet. It's the same reason most viruses are for Windows.
What do you mean "If Yahoo exited the field"? Do you actually know anyone who uses Yahoo for search? What was the last time you've heard "yahoo it"? How about "google it"? Yahoo still makes the best portal (my.yahoo.com - although they are getting annoying with their cutesy changes), but search? Anyone remember Altavista? Yahoo, meet Altavista.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
bing is better than google in many instances i've tried it. search for hardwood suppliers, bing gives me a page of websites of actual hardwood supply companies. google gives me the same for about the top 5 then it gives me a bunch of crap like link agregators and "top 5" sites
bing isn't infested with useless link agregators which have made google all but useless. with bing i don't have to crawl through the results looking for actual sources of information. i could definately see why google has jumped into action, only a fool would dismiss anything MS does.
Google's link-aggregators are there because of Google's market share. Were Bing to...uh...somehow become dominant, it would have the same sorts of problems pop up. Anyway, I don't think quality matters when it comes to web search. Google is a verb, and that's enough to give it the number one slot for a very long time.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Except that Bing sucks... Once the novelty of it wears off it will quickly relinquish it's temporary market share.
ImagePut - Free, Simple, Fast Image Hosting
Go to bing.com and click on video search. Then type in "naked women" and hit enter. Hover your mouse over each thumbnail. Now you should understand why google is scared shitless of bing, they are already destroying them where it counts, as a porn search engine.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
So how are you doing with your Zune? Happy with your Vista installation? Do you miss MS Office's Clippy? Are you old enough to remember Microsoft Bob?
What M$ has going for it is consumer inertia, monopoly business practices, and a big installed base. Your belief in their genius at understanding consumer wants is faith-based. The list of M$ marketing and tech failures above is a long way from complete.
That said, I use Bing occasionally when I don't find what I want in the first couple of pages of google hits. It isn't better, but sometimes, different is what's needed. As for their translation setup... the dual window thing might be useful for a professional language translator who's trying to clean up the translator's output, but if one doesn't speak the language, google's straightforward translation interface that simply throws the translation on a page works better.
While google should watch them as they do any other competitor, they have no reason for concern. At least not this year.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I tried a few searches on Bing, and one thing I noticed right away is how fast it is. It seems to be just a little snappier than Google. The search results seem to have equal correctness.
This space left intentionally blank.
That's probably because Bing Is Not Google; give the useless link farms a little while and they'll ensure Bing looks like Google.
I know that Microsoft is to be evil, and Google is to be the good guy, and /.ers mostly side with Google, yada yada yada...
All that asides, I'd like to say that, from my personal experiences, Bing is pretty good. I've been using it on and off since its launch, before its ad campaign. Note that I still use Google on an everyday basis, but Bing has been doing better and better.
I spent a bored Saturday afternoon, comparing the two, with different methods that I use everyday for searching:
In over half of what I put in, Bing came up with results that made more sense to me, and which are closer to what I'm searching for. I found that Google is more and more rigged with "hidden" ads, which is quite annoying at times. Maybe it's just that Google is better known, and all the so-called SEO experts work on it more, but it's still annoying.
That's just personal experience, and it's by no means scientific. YMMV. I, for one, welcome good search engine, even from the evil empire.
...same good results. Google's page rank system can and is being gamed all the time and so Google results includes lots of results that Bing's algorithm spares us from. Brin is right to be nervous. And I hate to say it too (i.e.,that Bing is a Mircro$oft service.) It just goes to show that MS really can perform, when they want to. It was the same way during the browser wars years ago. MS made a better one at a lower cost and improved it constantly. But after Netscape was crushed MS just cruised along on the wave of a monopoly. IE got stale, slow and ripe for competition to emerge. Kinda like Google search is today.
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
Maybe bloggers and link aggregators will find how to game bing in the future, but for the moment i find it's the better search engine, which really leads to your next statement which is pretty unbelievable - do you really think quality doesn't matter?! i don't ever want to hear you bagging microsoft products that have high market share or that are poor quality then, because according to you it doesn't matter.
for the rest of us, the quality of the results DO matter, and google would be stupid to ignore such a product.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
>> speculation on what the world of search would look like if Yahoo exited the field.
Similar to how the world of racing would look if stuffed turtles left it.
Microsoft does marketing better than everything else they do?
Yes. They're a marketing company that has some tech leanings - it's been this way for as long as I've been into computers (the early 80's)
I don't buy it. Embrace Extend Extinguish comes to mind for starters.
You mean the marketing thing they need to do because they're incapable of engineering something good themselves?
I'd say their ability to control the markets they are in is also more effective than their marketing.
Umm, marketing is how they control their markets.
I'm sure there's more if i cared to keep going
Maybe you should, because the examples you gave only undermined your point.
If google has been sitting on their laurels, relatively speaking, and allowing SEO types to game the algorithm outside of Google's advertising model, then something is wrong. If Bing truly has a roughly comparable quality results without being vulnerable to current google SEO strategies, then maybe one way or another it could make SEO less effective.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
so you would be willing to admit linux isn't anymore secure than windows then, because it's market share is so low the scum hasn't latched onto it yet? anti microsoft sentiment on this site constantly attacks that logic, it's interesting that so many people are now playing this card in defense of google.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Let's see. NY Post = NewsCorp, Hulu; Google = Newspaper-killer who should pay to link news articles, YouTube. MySpace fits in the mix somehow (NewsCorp owned).
If getting your site in Bing's search results means big bucks, they're gonna Game that just the same. You'll see the crap come flushing in.
Yup, that explains their pitiful market share and the general dearth of resources, so easy to observe in what goes on over there. They are as good as gone...
I would like to die like my grandfather did - sleeping. And not screaming in terror, like his passengers.
Rupert Murdoch's NY rag (the WSJ being the other)? Then it's scurrilous and almost certainly not true. Google isn't worried about Bing. The whole thing smells of astroturf and paid shills operating under cover of darkness.
Seriously... it's completely useless for someone in Western Australia.
Google is a powerful tool that I've found manages to index Microsoft own support site better than Bing does.
From my perspective they've done little more than join a bunch of poor performing search engines together and given it a New Yorker sounding name.
Lipstick on a Pig.
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
I rarely use my cell phone for anything other than phn calls the other day but out of courioisity decided to take a look at the data access. I went to do a web search and it said "powered by Bing".
Is this what MS is really after? Does Google compete in this space. I have no clue as, as I said, I don't use these services.
Anyone?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Give it time. If Bing catches on in any sort of way, it's dead certain the same people gaming Google will start to target Bing too. And when that happens I think we'll see Google's years of experience with dealing with being gamed give it the advantage again.
Keep doing business with a company that constantly breaks the law.
It is not Yada, yada, yada. It is simply that some of us actually prefer to do business with companies that are not unethical ...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I used it once. There were Spanish and Italian links within the first three results. Around result seven was a title full of line noise and text full of random words. Somewhere in the results I saw _anal sex_. I had to wipe away a tear, for bing reminded me of the Alta Vista search engine from the 1990s.
Their they're doing there hair.
Parent got rated "+5, insightful"...really? More like "-1, full of shit".
See for yourself. http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=hardwood+suppliers&btnG=Google+Search
I'm no carpenter, but I looked at all of the first 20 links and only one of them was a link farm. The rest were either actual vendors of hardwood floor supplies or legitimate lists of suppliers (like the ones magazines often have). In nearly every case there was an actual physical location or an online store where I could purchase wood.
If you're going to troll for Microsoft, go do it somewhere where people are too dumb to verify your claims.
... admit it, you searched for "latina takes it from behind".
Does "marketing" have a strict definition that could not be construed to include those things? I don't know the answer to that. I honestly thought that controlling or at least influencing the market was the primary goal of all marketing efforts and that the main difference between MS and other companies is that MS is more willing to engage in "questionable" marketing practices. I'm being careful how I say that because there are many things they do which may or may not be illegal (don't ask me, ask a lawyer) but in my mind are clearly unethical. I always saw embrace-extend-extinguish and their various forms of vendorlock as essential components of their marketing strategy, which is actually one of the primary reasons why I dislike them.
I think it's a great triumph of their marketing efforts that they remain so profitable despite the widespread disdain towards them. You may hate their guts but if you continue to buy their products they are not going to feel very hated. As the goal of a corporation is to produce a profit, and they are indeed profitable, it would be quite difficult for me to make the case that their marketing is inherently flawed. They have cash reserves which are the envy of many other companies. You could in fact say that their marketing is so effective that only the government was able to do anything to place some limits on it.
As others have said, I cannot prove but suspect that this is sort of like the "automobile recall" situation described in the movie Fight Club. If they know that the profit they will make from engaging in illegal activities is greater than the fines they will have to pay when they are caught, they don't really have a business reason not to engage in them. In that case, while I have no problem saying that they are a bunch of despicable bastards who would probably sell their first-born for a nickel, I must admit that in purely business terms, their strategy is sound.
I'll try to say this in a way that doesn't cause a flamewar. If you disagree with this, I accept that, but understand that at least the perception of this is quite real. Another reason why they are considered a marketing company more than a software company is that, with a few exceptions, it is not difficult to find higher-quality software than what they produce. That's a fact of which the general public is unaware, which is probably also marketing. When Win98 was the most popular desktop OS, Linux users everywhere realized the general public thought that computer crashes and frequent reboots were a normal, inherent part of operating a computer. They were not, and Linux proved that, but there is/was widespread ignorance about these things and the general public continued to buy Windows and learned to accept its problems because it did not occur to them to demand better until years later.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
You're probably correct, but by the same token, Google has taken over the search market by competing with incompetence.
I'm not personally convinced that the Google engine is really that good, in fact by design it's all but worthless for certain types of query. Originally it was designed to be fast and to not need to be able to comprehend the content of the page. Over the years they've had to change that because of the gamesmanship that inevitably occurs when you're at the top. And for the queries that I like to make, it doesn't do any better job of finding things than the older MS search did.
It's a sad state of affairs, but right now we should all be cheering on MS in their endeavor this one time, they are the only company right now that's even trying to bring Google into a more reasonable share of search queries.
If you're wondering if we MIGHT see astroturfing, I don't think you and I read the same comments thread.
Of course Google is scared! Bing doesn't require me to change my Image search filters to allow explicit material EVERY time I open a browser and search for 'boobs.'
I can think of a number of top tier companies, 3dfx for example, who were the absolute unquestioned masters of their market but who got wiped out because they didn't take their competition seriously and let their product stagnate.
Google almost certainly isn't running around in a panic over Bing, to wipe them out now would take a product which is measurably better in some important way(speed, ease of use, quality of results, etc) for anyone to even come close to toppling them. At the same time they'd be idiots to ignore new competition, inspiring the dominant market players to expend resources improving their products is one of the most common benefits of increased competition.
Google are just being sensible. Bing may be nothing in fact it almost certainly will be, but it may be something. Even if it only grabs 1% market share, if it grabs that share from google they lose money.
Only stupid companies blindly assume that their competition will fail and their dominance cannot be challenged, and Google are anything but a stupid company.
There, fixed that for you. Now you'll be able to properly find all the tentacle porn you were originally looking for.
Right Here.
signature is pants
While a big part of what Micrsoft has done is marketing, the marketing hype says that they have made the output of a search query more relevant to the subject matter being explored. For some people, this could be a very useful extension. Would it take long for Google to reproduce the results? Who knows... but also, is it patented? That could present a problem.
Still, I think we should have people here present their most objective analysis. Whatever the results may be, Google can replicate it to be sure. But frankly, I care which is the best and if there is a Firefox search thingy for it.
"Yes. They're a marketing company that has some tech leanings - it's been this way for as long as I've been into computers (the early 80's)"
Sure, who can forget the famous 1984 commercial and the 16 page insert in Newsweek magazine for Windows 1.0 .. oh wait.
The move by Brin is unusual, as it is rare these days for the Google founders to have such hands-on involvement in day-to-day operations at the company...
More likely they just needed a good laugh.
Microsoft must laid down some real PR bucks to get that press hit in the Post.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I just think that as soon as Bing becomes a verb... it has leveled the playing field. People just don't search, they google. When people starts "binging" they MS will have achieved something.
They've been hiring some of the best software engineers and managers forever. The fact that they can't seem to get their act together seems to be a problem of top management more than anything.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
I suspect that the name has a big part of it.
Altavista? MSN? Windows Live Search?
Nope. People want something funny and easy to remember.
Google! Bing! Yahoo!
I'm waiting for BamPow!
bing is better than google in many instances i've tried it. search for hardwood suppliers, bing gives me a page of websites of actual hardwood supply companies. google gives me the same for about the top 5 then it gives me a bunch of crap like link agregators and "top 5" sites
So I gave Bing a shot and found the results pretty close with more "directories" showing up earlier in Bing's results.
I'm sure that many Slashdotters will expect "a lot of astroturfing and scaremongering" because that's the way they think. Truth will not influence them one way or another.
Odd. I searched the same term "hardwood suppliers" in google and bing and they are pretty much the same.
Good is never enough, when you dream of being great!
C'mon. Everybody should know how to spell Microsoft by now. It's F U D. Pronounced "Microsoft."
One "Aw, Shit!" is worth 100 "Ata boys!"
This bit of fud suggests that this "bing" thing actually has, well, new parts? Something's changed? Improved, even slightly? It was my initial impression that it was some new makeup and rebranding of ye olde Windows Live Search, or whatever it was officially called last. You know, to be cool for the kids these days. No one wants to be all "let's windows live search some pr0n!" - it's much sexier if they bing Kim Kardashian, and then bing some homework. See, that works so well I never even imagined that there was more to it.
Even as you read this, your pants are strangling your loins! Aaa!
There is as much coding talent in Redmond as there is in Mountain View. The hackers and gamers will always be with us so whoever takes the initiative to beat them down the best without making their product difficult to use will win this particular battle, IMHO.
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
If I go to the Video tab the Microsoft commercial is #17, 2 places behind some whore dressed as a Catholic schoolgirl.
And the link takes me to youtube; not very good marketing.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
You're making a mistake a lot of people make, and that is grouping 'everything that is not tech' into the marketing category. The GP is right, Microsoft is horrible at marketing, have you seen their commercials? Where do you want to go today? Or the infamous Seinfeld shoe commercial? How about the words they choose, like Zune, or WinCE? Compare those to the little logos picked by Intel, the most successful of which may be 'Intel Inside.' Managers had no idea what Intel even was, but they knew they wanted it inside. Intel is always doing some little thing like that, whether Intel inside, or MMC, or the Intel Bunny suits. Compare Intel's website with Microsoft's, which one seems to suck you in more? Which one seems directed at helping you buy? That is marketing. I mean, have you seen Developers Developers, Developers? Do you really think anyone decided to try Microsoft because of that?
No, Microsoft is not good at marketing. What they do well is business. They have the sharpest business techniques you will ever see a company run. They originally got in the door by convincing IBM to give them the deal. All the way along, they've been making deals that somehow turn out best for them. With windows, they started by playing nice with IBM as long as possible, even promoting OS/2 for a while, until the precise moment when they needed to backstab them. With Netscape, Wordperfect, they kept on pushing their average products until the other companies made a mistep, and they were ready to pounce. If Google ever DOES make a mistake, they will be ready to pounce.
THAT'S what Microsoft does. They are always waiting and ready when their competitor stumbles.
Qxe4
Google is running scared from a rebranded failure. Just like Apple is quaking in it's boots over the Zune.
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
Yes, Google is running scared, and they should be. My business' web site traffic has doubled from just two weeks ago. Google traffic is the same. Bing traffic is HUGE. I love Bing, and they are a serious contender.
Bing?
If Sergei Brin is worried about Bing it's because he hasn't actually used it. Even on Channel 9, Microsoft's official fanboy site, people are trashing Bing.
Bing is to Google as Microsoft Paint is to Adobe Photoshop.
Even in the 80s, Microsoft products were copies. MS DOS copied DR DOS. MS Basic copied every other Basic. MS Excel copied Lotus 123 which copied Visicalc. What product has Microsoft ever had that wasn't a copy ?
.
The only news here is why some people think this is newsworthy. Is Microsoft trying to push this issue to the forefront in order to embelish their faulty attempt to enter the search business?
Exactly, I have no intention of even looking at BING.
For the past 5 years or so, I've outright dismissed every pretender "Google killer" that comes along. Then, after the Bing release I started thinking about my latest searches through Google. The fact is I've been getting so many advertising links returned instead of what I'm looking for that the first page often doesn't give me what I'm looking for (quite different from the past). I don't know when this degradation in performance for commercial interests happened, but I'm now aware of it and annoyed enough that I'd consider another search engine. That to me is what makes this time different.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
On the one hand, the lack of a technologically compelling competitor to Google concerns me. As a consequence, google susceptibility to SEO gaming is significant, but Google doesn't have a sound business justification to change what is working unless a competitor outdoes them. Unfortunately, in business the only 'justifiable' time to fund improvements is when there is *something* to gain and Google simply has nothing to gain in this context without competition.
On the other hand, I don't think Microsoft should be the one to come in. They are another goliath that retains some good technical people, but strategically knows little more than brute force nowadays to get into markets. They bought their way into second place in game consoles, they are trying to buy their way into some niche markets where Linux currently leads (both in the server room and embedded spaces). They tend to offer generally 'mostly sufficient' technology that doesn't really stack up to their competition or blow them away on a technical level, but earns what ground it can by sheer force of money earned through the markets they did corner at the right time with the right technology (invented or purchased). Through dumping (and even further, sometimes essentially bribing customers to use their products) they pursue an obsessive need to take over new markets.
In other words, I want to see Google challenged by a competitor on the strength of the technology they offer, not on the strength of a massive marketing budget and the ability to blatantly lose money for future market share. I have tons of respect for Google for actually innovating and revolutionizing search while every major player languished. I want another google, not microsoft, to get Google back on its toes.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It's only bad marketing if Microsoft releases their own Video hosting service. It would probably have a terrible name like Ving or Wim!
Imagine what windows would have been named if it was named by the guys that thought up the names of Xbox, Zune, and Bing.
signature is pants
Why am I not even compelled to try it out?
May be because the only Microsoft product line I (ever) like(d) is the MS mice.
(I lied, I really liked MS Word in 1988 after trying out Word Perfect, but stayed with LaTeX anyway)
An example of such a search please? I'd like to test it.
"So don't get programmed by anybody but yourself" --Bill S. Preston, Esquire
You're probably correct, but by the same token, Google has taken over the search market by competing with incompetence.
I wouldn't call their competitors incompetant - but I would call them absent. I mean, Yahoo still can't decide if they're actually a competitor in search or not. MS themselves only decided to focus on search around 4 years ago. So Google's been able to pretty much do their own thing for a while now.
I'm not personally convinced that the Google engine is really that good, in fact by design it's all but worthless for certain types of query. Originally it was designed to be fast and to not need to be able to comprehend the content of the page. Over the years they've had to change that because of the gamesmanship that inevitably occurs when you're at the top. And for the queries that I like to make, it doesn't do any better job of finding things than the older MS search did.
I wouldn't go that far (as to say that Google's search is not good). Google are certainly not the first company to tackle search (I'm sure you remember AltaVista, for example). To their credit, even in absense of credible competitors they haven't been standing still. They've added a lot of 'smartness' to their results over the years. But they've definitely accelerated that pace over the last 2 or 3 years. But maybe lack of stagnation is just a question of perception - maybe after Bing and Google slug it out for a few years we'll look back at search as it exists today and think, "well, that was pretty fucking lame".. Only time will tell. But I do agree with you -- for that to happen, there has to be a credible competitor. And at the moment that competitor is Bing.
Compare them yourself, without branding: http://blindsearch.fejus.com/
This site basically outputs search results in three columns, with all formatting uniform, all branding removed and columns permuted on every search. You vote for the best results. I found myself unknowingly "voting" for Bing a surprising number of times.
If you look at the comparison image the site made, one of the comparisons made is that Google's home page is "plain white" while Bing's has "cool photos". Wait, what? Yeah, go take a look. The article spends about 5 paragraphs talking about the "story" then rattles on about Microsoft for the rest of the page.
I have tried for example to search the term "wortschaft" (economy) and with google I got first wikipedia (de.wikipedia.org)then other stuff like spiegel.de etc... When I said to it "only german page" I STILL got de.wikipedia.org. And i get google news as search result somewhere on the first page (not on top!). But with Bing de.wikipedia.org is gone, probably because it is .org and not .de so bing got ride of it (I assume) so here google shows more completeness of result no matter why, and on the first page I am not getting google news. Why don't I get google news on top ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The article is most likely BS, written by someone who doesn't know how the Search industry works. Let me lay out some facts for you so that you see why I think it's BS:
1. Most, if not all algorithms that Live Search / Bing uses are PUBLICLY DISCLOSED in papers published by Microsoft Research, and the corresponding patents that Microsoft holds. You don't need to "identify" anything. And even if you did, the new features introduced by Bing are so superficial that "identifying" similar algorithms would not take Google's engineers and researchers much time.
2. All major search engines monitor each other constantly and they know exactly what the competition's NDCG metrics (normalized cumulative distributed gain - the measure of how relevant the results are) are. As a rule, it's undesirable to crank up the NDCG too much, since doing so reduces the click through rate on ads, so historically, Google has kept their NDCG just a wee bit ahead of Yahoo and Live, and every time the two would update their algorithms, Google would crank it up a notch to stay ahead. To think that they've been sitting on their ass in the past couple of years is stupid.
So at most, I think Google is working on some experimental stuff related to presentation of results, which is where it's currently lacking, in spite of their half assed, hidden-by-default sidebar.
Windows Media Player... now goes to 11.
I mean that sucks me right in. If there's anything that's funny, it's a quote from a 25 year old movie.
Way to go Microsoft Marketing.
You're confusing marketing with advertising. There's much more to marketing than advertising and Microsoft is exceedingly good at the former despite being poor at the latter.
Great. Give some examples of their great marketing, and back yourself up. Otherwise your post is just words in the wind.
Qxe4
Trolled into dust, oh my!
There are two kinds of moderator. Those who are brave enough to be honest with themselves and those who are not.
And I guess there is a third. The Bumpkin.
-FL
True enough, but it's also possible to pay too much attention to details. There's always the chance of a misstep somewhere, but I think Google's most at risk if they pay attention to the wrong detail, or waiting for a large volume of data to make "the perfect choice" where the best course of action would be simply to make a different choice.
That said, it is still kind of hard to accept Microsoft as a credible threat, except that this is version 2 of their search engine. They might have some details right this time.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Hilarious your worthless post gets modded insightful. This place is so blatantly anti-MS it's pathetic.
Rather than trying to compete on general research against Google, Bing's strategy is to select the targeted queries as the search for goods and services (travel, shopping, health, local searches., etc). The idea is bright, especially since such queries are the most likely to bring the $ dollars from advertisers. However, the trick is good but I see nothing that Google cannot ultimately counter ...
weill go on and BING for "Microsoft word torrent" and see for yourself who's the winner
Oh, I'm sorry, I thought your own examples would suffice once you recognized there was a difference between marketing and advertising. For example, Bill Gates convincing IBM to allow them to write the DOS for them is pure marketing whereby Bill Gates created his entire software empire by creating a market out of software sales that would have been developed in-house and given away by IBM if he had not done so. In the case of Netscape and Wordperfect, Microsoft made it easy for users of MS alternatives to read competitors' files while only creating content in their own standards which many here call "embrace, extend and extinguish." This is a pure marketing ploy to make your product the only one in the market which reads everything while making it difficult for your competitors to read your output. This makes using MS products the path of least resistance for those reading documents while forcing everyone else to also buy MS products to read the documents produced. This was not an engineering decision but a carefully considered marketing decision.
But these are just your examples. Microsoft has exhibited marketing excellence throughout its existence from choosing to offer discounts to computer manufacturers who do not sell systems with alternative OSes to MCSEs and Microsoft Solution providers who are provided with primarily marketing resources rather than technical resources. Apparently, much of what you think is just "business" is the particular subset of business known as marketing.
The site looks like it was made using a combination of Paint/Frontpage. I'm not sure how i'm meant to take anything that looks like that seriously. And from my limited experience using Bing and WolframAlpha, WA has been more useful every time.
P.s. I found Google Squared quite interesting, even though it doesn't target the same thing as either of the above.
Ludicrous, just ludicrous. Is this even a real story? Someone out making shit up again? Mother been telling ya stories again?
This is so far fetched as to make the author liable for defamation against Google and Sergey Brin.
In all honesty maybe those exaggerations regarding professional journalists vs. bloggers has some credibility. Na, this guy is just a turd. They shouldn't have given him a platform to write on.
Bing is a non-product. Just move along.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
I tried it, yes. It sucks. It adds nothing. It doesn't address what I'm after. It is biased. It is from a company that is willing to loose money to gain some future market share rather than really come up with innovative products. Their history is rife with this attitude. Just look at the XBOX.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
You give Microsoft too much credit. They are not a good competitor. They are a monopoly. Monopolies do not compete. Microsoft hasn't competed for a decade. They simply take losses till they gain enough market share then use their monopoly to kill the competition.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
http://video.msn.com/
How is 'google' more serious word then? bing is really easy to remember actually.
m$soft is getting desperate and feeding stories to /. to get their name on the map.. lmao
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
As a marketing strategy, the Seinfield ads sucked but were interesting nonetheless.
First of all, people were talking about them. Not exactly in a good way, but I can remember Slashdot posting article after article about them.
The second thing was the subtle message in each one of them. Every one of them had something to do with Vista. for example:
1) Bill Gates needing a Size 10 shoe instead of a size 9 = Vista needing a high end PC instead of a stripped down one.
2) Family accusing Bill and Jerry of stealing a giraffe but later turned out to be framed by family sister = Internet accusing Vista of sucking but later turned out to be spreading from a few sites.
The problem with this is it was never explained in the commercials. They figured that if you knew anything about Vista you would get it and had Seinfield talk about cake computers and Gates doing the robot instead of explaining the message they were trying to get across.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
NO, embrace, extend, extinguish has nothing to do with this.
Embrace, extend, extinguish is what they did with browser technology, with java technology, with Open GL, etc.
They would, say in the case of Java do this:
1) sign license
2) create virtual machine for windows
3) alter the java VM to add the ability to do some new and different things in Windows that you can't do in other OSes, such as Linux or Unix,etc.
4) after the momentum is enough then declare Java (as Sun designed it) dead and that everyone should be using Microsoft's technologies.
5) discontinue it because it potentially has the ability to undo the actual OS market.
That's what happened. That's embrace, extend, extinguish.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
You are so clueless when it comes to SMB/CIFS and you have no clue what the pressures were on interoperability and why the EU sued Microsoft over this.
On top of that you don't understand that there is no anti-Microsoft attitude here. There's just Microsoft fanboism and everyone else.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Funny. I went to bing by searching "bing" on Google. Sure enough, bing.com is top of the list.
Then I tried to search "bing" on bing, bing.com, is just 7th place!
Your example is not Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. It has nothing to do with it. The idea of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish in example is:
Java was developed by Sun as an open standard for programming applets that were OS independent.
Microsoft licensed that technology under the terms that they not modify it to make it platform specific.
Microsoft ignored those terms making their VM extensions specific to Windows. They did this so that developers would develop for their VM/implementation thus failing to support the open standards/platform. This training of Developers Developers Developers to the Microsoft way was the extend portion of that business tactic.
Sun saw this and sued Microsoft. Microsoft was ordered to remove the VM from Windows as it was a violation of the terms of the license. Essentially they embraced Java, then extended it, then attempted to extinguish it but Sun go the upper hand. Then end result was close to a multi-billion dollar judgment against Microsoft.
That's embrace, extend, extinguish. You are talking in terms of proprietary vendor lock in.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
It is said that Bing is a recursive acronym for "Bing Is Not Google". I think that is something about which we can all agree: Bing is not Google.
When you try the blind search test, the results look very similar. All the mainstream search engines are doing about equally well. There was a period in 2007 when Yahoo was substantially ahead of the others, because they had about fifty special-case recognizers for things like celebrities and movies, but now everybody has that. (And nobody noticed that Yahoo was better for the six months they had a technical edge, anyway.)
Try heavily-spammed searches like "London hotels". All the big guys are still being fooled by ad-heavy redirector sites. It's possible to do better against link spammers, but the big guys aren't trying very hard to do so. Google used to be against "search engine optimization", but some time in 2007 they went over to the dark side and started sponsoring SEO conferences. It's inevitable; Google makes their money from AdWords. Search is just a traffic builder.
The visual that comes to mind when I think about Google and Microsoft slugging it out is a 550 pound gorilla fucking the shit out of a lemur monkey in the ass. Microsoft is not even remotely close to the size of Google in the search arena. They shouldn't want to get locked in the same cage with Google.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
yup just a story to make the news... kinda like our "news" reports about politics, nothing to do with reality...
tried it also and was under impressed.... other than the embeded playable video stuff...
locked out of this slashdot account for 10+ years... Im back
I'm no fan (anymore) of Microsoft's, but having actually lived through that era I feel I should contribute my observations. IBM was ready to kill Microsoft, and OS/2 was precisely the weapon to do so, so it's wrong to say Microsoft backstabbed IBM. Netscape and Wordperfect were not nearly the same stories. Wordperfect at one point in time required a key combination to show you a preview of what your page looked like, while Word was much closer to the modern WYSIWYG word processor, and IMO won fair and square on technical merits. Similarly, Excel beat out Lotus 1-2-3, which was very late to the GUI.
My problem with Microsoft was how it acted after their success, such as with Stac and Netscape, as well as with the lack of improvements to their products.
I agree with you. 99 times out of 100 when you enter a company's name, you get several hundred hits for web sites selling the company's product, but you won't find the link to the company you are looking for itself. Or if you are interested in trying to do some research on [pick any topic] and do a Google search using that topic as a starting point, you will get thousands of hits trying to sell you anything associated with it. But with the exception of a Wikipedia link usually a few links down, you won't find anything useful helping you to research your topic. And then there is the issue of revenue generating ads. As long as web sites don't throw pulsating, gibbering, and epileptic seizure inducing advertisements in their margins or banners, I don't have an issue with ads. They have to make money and pay for their servers etc. (I do use ad blocker plus, so I guess this makes me somewhat hypocritical about this since I never check to see how many static ads it filters out... my preference would be that it allows 100% of the static ads through... a bit of carrot to counter the whip... but who has time to verify this?). So those static ads with words like 'buy' and 'price' etc. could screw up the search as well (I guess depending on how static the ads get :) )
People wonder why Wikipedia has gotten so popular. It is because it is the only place you can go on the internet, enter a search term, and have a reasonable expectation of getting a hit on the subject you want to learn about; without having to jump through all sorts of filtering hoops to ignore things like 'buy' or 'sale' or 'download'. Sure you can filter like that, but you also may be screwing your search at the same time. What if you are writing a paper on topics from actuators to zebras. You may want to know how much of your search topic items are bought each year, how much of a country's GDP was based on it, etc. while not wanting to buy any. You may end up filtering out sites that are useful to you. I gave a couple of random examples, but this can apply to almost anything.
What I would like to see Google do (and all the other search engines too for that matter), is create an option and associated algorithm to break out web searches into two fundamental/gross search categories:
I would like to see any progress on getting more meaningful results back from a search. I don't think we will ever see this since all the search engines generate their revenue through advertising. Ultimately, this means we are stuck knowing how much everything costs, but never able to find out what they are good for. :-)
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I mean, have you seen Developers Developers, Developers? Do you really think anyone decided to try Microsoft because of that?
No, but in Microsoft's defense, that was never meant to be marketing. That was a pep rally for Microsoft's existing customers who are already doing software development on Microsoft's platform, and was meant to make them feel valued and important. The Internet allows us to take things people say out of context, and sometimes they sound ridiculous. For the people who were in the room at the time, it didn't seem that crazy.
Everything else you said was spot on. ;-)
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
> Right off the wheel, I would say that if Microsoft is so terrible, why is no one in the FOSS movement able to come up with an IDE consistently as good as Visual Studio?
We tend not to like IDEs very much.
> Why is it that the state of the art in FOSS Office applications still has less features than Office 2000?
Because it doesn't?
> If Microsoft is such a shoddy company, where's the VB for Linux?
There: http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html. Or Python / Ruby with Qt / Gtk, depending what you mean by "VB". Or Mono.
> If I look around Linux, the only big thing that's innovative is KDE 4.
You didn't look very hard didn't you? The most innovative thing I saw recently is how perl 6 reinvented regexes, I can't wait for it to spread to other languages.
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
However, your point is weakened by your lack of attention to the details of reality. IBM sought out Microsoft's help with DOS, it wasn't the other way around. It was a big deal: for the first time in history IBM built the entire computer by subcontractors. This wasn't marketing, it was IBM looking for someone to build an OS for them. Their first choice, Digital, rejected them.
Let's look at Netscape: it wasn't the 'extra features' that made the difference (I assume this is what you mean by making files that competitors couldn't read), if that were all Netscape would have won because they were doing it too. Also, I don't remember any websites having trouble rendering in Netscape during the 90s, so Microsoft's attempts weren't very effective. In the end, it was Netscape creating a bloated, inefficient browser that killed them. IE WAS better, so there was no reason to switch to Netscape anymore. It wasn't Microsoft who killed them, it was Netscape who killed themselves. Microsoft kept trying until finally Netscape tripped and fell.
You're also making a stretch to consider vendor lock-in strategies to be marketing. Marketing is finding out what your customers need, and letting your customers know that you can provide something they want. Vendor lock-in doesn't really fall into that category.
Microsoft has exhibited marketing excellence throughout its existence from choosing to offer discounts to computer manufacturers who do not sell systems with alternative OSes to MCSEs and Microsoft Solution providers who are provided with primarily marketing resources rather than technical resources.
I don't know if I would consider this marketing either. It's once again a trap that wouldn't work except Microsoft has enough power in the market to bully OEMs. It only works because their 'customers' lack any sort of choice. It's more like strong-armed-negotiation-tactics, and potentially abuse of a monopoly.
Qxe4
Ah, you're right. I was getting it confused with this commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk
Not sure which was better.
Qxe4
What came to mind when I read the name:
;)
Bing sucks - Because Its Not Google
One has to wonder how the creators of the name feel about it *g*. I mean didn't anybody think of it or what?
Hilarious to hear you people using the same argument you dismiss when Microsoft uses it to explain to you numbskulls why Windows has viruses and Linux/Apple have few - because nobody cares about Linux/Apple as they have a tiny market share.
This must be the most transparent desperate try at getting good PR i have seen in a long time. Its pretty obvious Microsoft wants to distribute a picture of Google "putting their best" at finding out what new wonderful things has come from the name change Microsoft did. Everyone knows its just a rebranded Live Search with hand tweaked results.
Bing is just as bad as Live Search unless you stumble upon a very limited set of handmade search results. Bottomline, its still Live Search and the algorithm still sucks. No amount of PR will change that.
The only thing i think Google is afraid of is Microsoft using its monopoly to crush any competition. Like, using an upgrade to change peoples search presets or pushing people towards bing no matter where they really want to go...
HTTP/1.1 400
We tend not to like IDEs very much.
There's an awful lot of them, to say you don't like then, there's the Qt IDE, Sun's IDE, KDevelop, Anjuta...
Because it doesn't?
Um, look beyond the word processor. The spreadsheet is pretty rough and the Access-clone is terrible.
There: http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html [sourceforge.net]. Or Python / Ruby with Qt / Gtk, depending what you mean by "VB". Or Mono.
Gambas doesn't even match VB 6. And what I mean by VB is an all in one integrated RAD development environment where Forms, Event Handling are built into the one thing. That pretty much means, Gambas...
Oh, and by the way, neither Qt or Gtk have a native grid that matches the grid controls used in Windows. The only Linux GUI kit that has even halfway decent widgets is WxWidgets and it falls short of what you can get out of Win32 native components...although I will say that Wx has a better document / component model than MFC does.
This is my sig.
Microsoft is doing THE ONLY THING it's good at - Marketing.
In this case does it really matter? Google and Microsoft are both repositioning themselves as marketers... they are both big enough to compete with one another on even terms. I for one think that competition between the two will be a good thing... hopefully it will deliver more 'innovation' from both companies
You have to try the scientific comparison - http://blindsearch.fejus.com/. Shows results from google, bing and yahoo in random order. I tried a few different searches and you could always tell the lame yahoo results, but bing and google were hard to tell apart. The site is run by a microserf though.
Hey I won't defend Microsoft's business practices but one thing Microsoft is very good at is integrating products and services. The other thing is making these products relatively easy to setup and use. These are their real strengths. The fact that someone with no real IT experience can setup a reasonably complex network (ie. Directory services, DNS, etc etc) is a major accomplishment. Unfortunately the downside is that inexperienced people also tend to make a meal of it and you end up with some nasty lookin networks. When everything works it works really well... it's when it doesn't work then that's where you have problems.
Surprised no one said anything about this. Once people discover they can get money back while shopping online, they just might stay. Thats a big incentive for some people. Also, the technology they recently bought for travel is also a big deal. I dont like Microsoft, I believe they are dumping on the market to grab share and then screw everyone eventually. They can afford to do this because they are not a search company at the core.
heh.. I think the lemur doesn't have much of a choice -- the Gorilla's been trying to visit the Lemur's cage of late (y'know, Chrome, Android, Google Docs, etc.)
Now that's a big part of the market we're talking about. So Google is rightly scared out of its wits.
Sorry ... can't fault Microsoft this time. It's finally delivering value to the masses.
I'm guessing because it's a standard. Why did Microsoft implement them instead of coming up with their own better font system? Incidentally, xorg also has PostScript Type1 fonts support as well. Another standard. The one that had Apple developing TrueType to avoid due to licensing issues. Note also that TrueType had a lot of problems breaking in to the targeted market because publishing houses had already invested heavily on Type1 fonts. Going against entrenched industry standards is tough.
Because SMB is a common standard. I prefer to avoid using SMB when I can. I very, very rarely use it for printing (I know - shocking that you can find other printing protocols on most enterprise networks if you look). I occasionally use it for file sharing (I prefer using SSHFS). But it's nice to have available since Microsoft dominates the desktop environment and is incapable of doing anything but SMB (out of the box at least).
I haven't noticed the Linux world clamoring for VB. There's definitely folks who think there should be one - I've heard of such projects since 2000. There are even proprietary products that claim to bring VB to Linux. But it seems to be a niche thing. Why? Don't know. I'm not a VB user. Maybe someone else can offer better insight as to why Microsoft shops love VB and the rest of the world doesn't.
...the evidence: http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/1696/bing2.jpg
throw new NoSignatureException();
Commercials are "important" to marketing, but commercials are not marketing. I'm not aware of any major corporation that does its own commercials. They generally hire an outside ad agency, that then does the commercials, and whatever research defined by the marketing director. I wouldn't judge a marketing director solely by its failed commercial campaigns. (But failure to capture/gain a market is reason to fire one, and crappy commercials would be a culprit.)
Marketing is figuring out what the status quo is, then figuring what nature of product can be introduced that makes money, then defining the strategy to maximize market share/profits. When you think of marketing, think Steve Jobs and Apple, and how they got their overpriced products sold to a rabid minority. Yes, Microsoft does not have a genius marketing department, but breaking legs hasn't been what got Microsoft on top of the software world (even though MS excels at it and are quite eager to break legs).
Windows was a strategic decision. The advantages of a GUI interface to the ungeek masses was pretty obvious after Apple came out with the Mac. Microsoft saw that IBM did not want to drive OS/2 into the consumer market, or was too inept to do so, and then decided they had to eat IBM's dinner. IBM whines about being backstabbed, because they're losers who never saw the importance of the consumer market to their market share. They had a technically superior product, talk about being bad marketers.
It was WYSIWYG and the Office application suite that killed Wordperfect, and that was marketing's kill. Wordperfect sat clueless, then fell behind on what their customer base wanted. Late on WYSIWYG, then late on bundling a robust spreadsheet, presentation, and database apps to the wordprocessor. Why buy 2nd best or the oddball, when Microsoft sold you everything you needed, AND EVERYONE else used MS products (compatibility)?
Finally, killing Netscape was a coup for BillyG, if you believe the Businessweek article. Bill groks that the Internet is the new market, Netscape already "owned" it, and Microsoft had to make a presence from NOTHING. He quickly figures out that Netscape makes all their money from the browser. So MS offers a free browser, and sucks all the financial oxygen from Netscape. Add an email client, and support for every internet gadget, and the only competitor to Microsoft is the amorphous internet giving away a free OS (until Google). THAT is marketing.
Business tactics is creating a pricing scheme that puts only your OS on every computer built by a large manufacturer, and use it to threaten any manufacturer that tries to put on linux as an alternative.
Microsoft does not wait for their competitors make a mistake. NO successful business waits for their competitor. Microsoft treats each competitor's product like a marathon. They're so rich (and somewhat talented), they'll just fall behind and pace the leader, letting him/her break the air while they draft. Eventually, Microsoft figures out when to make their move. It takes exceptional marketing to redefine the competition in a way that the end result is making more money.
Bing is Microsoft's marketing answer to Google. The race isn't who puts out the best links to queries; the race is which search engine leads to the most sales. Bing may not generate superior search results to Google, but if you're looking to buy something, Microsoft is all over the experience. And its a simpler, more automated experience, because the unwashed masses are stupid, and appreciate people who make things easier for them without pointing out they are stupid. Advertisers will eventually want to throw money at Bing, because that's where they'll make more sales.
The NY Post story is a planted POS story, because Ballmer is the dumbest CEO with a job. Sergey Brin is not a money guy, an ego guy, or a BillyG paranoia "I must always win" guy. Google management whistled Sergey in, because they're not technical enough to determine the response. Google management took a look at Bing, figured out what's MS's game, and will make their adjustments. Meanwhile, Google's working on its game changer, which will probably be some form of semantic web environment; the Holy Grail of Internet search.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
this really made my morning, I've been laughing like a maniac while posting /. for making another monday morning merry.
(again)
Thanks,
~men are from earth. women are from earth. deal with it.~
Oh, and by the way, neither Qt or Gtk have a native grid that matches the grid controls used in Windows.
I've no idea about Gtk there, but what's wrong with Qt grid?
The only Linux GUI kit that has even halfway decent widgets is WxWidgets
Erm, are you seriously saying that wxWidgets offer better widgets than Qt? esp. grid?..
it falls short of what you can get out of Win32 native components.
You totally lose me there, given that native Win32 controls are very limited (they don't include dockable toolbars, for example, nor a proper grid). Comparing to VCL or WinForms would be more reasonable, though even then I don't see what they can offer that Qt does not.
Then there's WPF, but that's a very different story...
In the BillyG era, that was definitely Microsoft's MO. They're not quite doing that now.
MS has not killed Java. They're not even remotely close to killing Java. In fact, by your description, MS has failed in their attempt. They certainly failed in their classic attempt with Microsoft Java (better, faster, more stable). Darn that meddling DOJ...
No, MS's strategy now is define what makes Java popular, what's Java's weaknesses, and how they can outdo Java to the point its irrelevant. That is what .Net is. MS incorporates some of Java's technical advantages with MS's own VM, then makes a framework Sun can't match with .Net, and finally designs in advantages Java can't match, like supporting different languages on the same VM and making the products interchangable, and "stability/reusability" of current products. (By comparison: What's Java's GUI/net libraries/suite this year? It started out with Java applets, then Java Beans, now its Java Swing, what will it be tomorrow?) Oh yeah, and finally create a capable if not kickass IDE, MS Studio, and then give it away for free.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
I always thought it was a play on the term 'googolplex', which is often misspelled as 'googleplex'.
Sort of implying that they had 'googles' of information.
Common sense is not so common.
But by bringing users to youtube, Google has to eat the bandwidth cost, while not making a profit on it.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
how about insted of "Technology: Does Bing Have Google Running Scared?" we try a more realistic "Technology: Google, still on top and willing to try and improve after Bing's release."
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
Shouldn't that be: It's nice to see Macs and Windows keeping Linux honest??
I agree with you. 99 times out of 100 when you enter a company's name, you get several hundred hits for web sites selling the company's product, but you won't find the link to the company you are looking for itself.
Care to come up with some examples? I just tried four company names and every one had the company as the first result. It might not be scientific but very far from 1 times out of 100 then? At this point you need 396 search queries that gives no match for the companys website within the first hundret results.
Google is fine when searching for companies it seems. Asus even had a link to their norwegian site as the first result (I sit in Norway).
You hit the nail on the head really.
Everywhere else didn't see search as core to the internet, they saw portals as core to people's internet usage and search was just a minor part of that, to them search had to just about work but not be particularly amazing because if people wanted information on a particular subject they'd just go through their portal's lovely directory.
But of course Google realised they were wrong, Google realised people just wanted to type in what they wanted and get it and that's effectively what Google does well. It gives you what you ask for, it wont answer questions very well but it'll give you some of the best information relevant to whatever you asked. This was far and away above what search engines prior to Google were doing, they often responded with a load of crap and you'd actually have to go past the first page to find what you wanted all too often.
As you say, Google got where they are because the other web companies of the time were too incompetent to notice what people actually wanted.
I am a native English speaker living and working in Switzerland. Usually, when I search with Google, I set the search options to English and Google will happily then return English results based on page rank. Google also has a local Swiss option for whatever language I search in, i.e. to search in pages form Switzerland only. Bing allows you to search in English but still returns English pages from Germany. I haven't found a way to get it to return pages from Switzerland or international English pages yet.
On top of the some of the search results are just poor. To trip the engine up, I entered "pussy" into the search box (with an English search) and Bing only returned a warning that this might lead to sexual content, obviously not recognising that the word also has non sexual connotations, i.e. cats.
This is just poor, and the article in the NYP is almost certainly a Microsoft influenced one (I won't make direct accusations here), or the author is looking for page hits by making controversial remarks.
After reading many comments in this feed, I decided to get over to http://www.bing.com/ to search for something I use regularly (eclipse rcp) and compare it to Google's results on that same topic. But, I got this error when I hit [Enter]. In the 5 years I've been using Google, this sort of error has *never* happened [to me]. That was my cue to get off slashdot, stop wasting time with Bing and start some work.
ASSERT: *** Search: _installLocation: engine has no file!
Stack Trace:
0:ENSURE_WARN(false,_installLocation: engine has no file!,2147500037)
1:()
2:()
3:()
4:epsGetAttr([object Object],alias)
5:()
6:SRCH_SVC_getEngineByAlias(http://www.bing.com)
7:getEngineByAlias(http://www.bing.com)
8:getShortcutOrURI(http://www.bing.com,[object Object])
9:canonizeUrl([object KeyboardEvent],[object Object])
10:handleURLBarCommand([object KeyboardEvent])
11:anonymous(textentered,[object KeyboardEvent])
12:fireEvent(textentered,[object KeyboardEvent])
13:onTextEntered()
14:handleEnter(false)
15:onKeyPress([object KeyboardEvent])
16:onxblkeypress([object KeyboardEvent])
blog.idigitall.com
Bill Gates needing a Size 10 shoe instead of a size 9 = Vista needing a high end PC instead of a stripped down one.
I have a feeling you're reading too much into it. Moreover, even if that was their message the analogy is completely wrong. People for the better part of their life use the same number of shoes. It would make just a little bit of sense if they were showing some boy/girl (which have different shoe number every year).
But in any case you may have extremely subtle messages in a pile of junk but only 0,01% of the target population will understand it. But do you really want that? Why not send a hand signed mail to those 10 people instead of wasting millions on a production of one of the worst commercials I have ever seen?
Apple's commercials may be arrogant* or whatever, but people understand them and get their point completely. And that is the point of a commercial. If you don't want for your stuff to be understood, to be always confused, well one should stop doing commercials and write post modernism drivel.
First of all, people were talking about them.
I'm guessing that you are referring to the saying that there is no such thing as a bad publicity? The saying is generally true, but when one is producing material of questionable coherence against itself, people will say that the author is crazy. And that was precisely the point which was raised against those commercials. Nobody understood them, and that was probably because there was nothing to understand, and they were a complete failure. If they didn't spend millions on those commercials everyone would forget those the very next day. The problem was that they did spend a fortune on those commercials and people, completely predictable, talked about them. Not much about the message (as I said, there was none for the general population), but they talked about the waste of money and just reinforcing the image of completely clueless microsoft and his ex ceo. And that kind of publicity they certainly don't want.
* and that can generally be a good thing for a consumer because a lot of consumers was to buy "exclusive" products so they can feel special.
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.
the only thing I can see interesting on bing is the hover box which previews stuff on a page. other that, I don't notice anything unique except the brand. And the hover box info on the real search I did (rather than the test ones) didn't give me useful information. I can see it being useful with pictures. However, I'm sure there is already a google/firefox plugin that does such things better if I really wanted that feature.
I agree with the consensus here, this article is just marketing. (also, I just realised, because I can't spell worth sh*t, so I looked up "concensus", that bing isn't as good a spell check as google)
Stupidity is its own reward.
And then there is the issue of revenue generating ads. As long as web sites don't throw pulsating, gibbering, and epileptic seizure inducing advertisements in their margins or banners, I don't have an issue with ads.
So you don't have a problem with google ads then? The split in searches that you ask fo is kind of there already, there's Froogle for the commercial searches and regular google for the rest. I know that's not quite what you mean, but I don't think even the google algorithm can figure out which pages on the internet are pertinent to the effect of the tennis shoe market on indonesian workers.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
>> That's embrace, extend, extinguish. You are talking in terms of proprietary vendor lock in.
Actually, if I understand your point correctly, that's "embrace, extend, pay and retract." Java went on for a while after that.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Really. Well done. This story; the "sound of found" name for something I'd associate with the waste product of coal mining (bing). Actually, Bing's pretty good too. I did bother to try it, thanks to the marketing. But for some reason, I've returned to Google since trying it. Hmm...
Microsoft are terrible at marketing. I'm not sure why you think this is what they are best at.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I do feel uneasy deep down inside when I think "Google", but when I think, "Bing", I feel a burning horror very close to the surface.
Sheesh, you may want to reconsider your search terms when doing video/image searches.
I haven't noticed the Linux world clamoring for VB. There's definitely folks who think there should be one - I've heard of such projects since 2000. There are even proprietary products that claim to bring VB to Linux. But it seems to be a niche thing. Why? Don't know. I'm not a VB user. Maybe someone else can offer better insight as to why Microsoft shops love VB and the rest of the world doesn't.
Microsoft shops 'love' VB because it's easy to put a moron behind VB and let him produce something by sheer brute force. It's the shotgun of development, just shoot enough and you'll hit something.
Now, why don't we see the same kind of development environment for Linux? Because we don't need it, there are less people and even less morons developing software for Linux. And where we need something like VB there is Java to fill the spot.
We tend not to like IDEs very much. There's an awful lot of them, to say you don't like then, there's the Qt IDE, Sun's IDE, KDevelop, Anjuta... Because it doesn't? Um, look beyond the word processor. The spreadsheet is pretty rough and the Access-clone is terrible.
I'd put that all under the category of "most of us don't like getting our hands held" I mean, who would use access when you can make a mysql database with web front-end for entering/querying data etc?
Same deal with ide's, some people use them, a lot don't. I use emacs to code, while emacs is a heavily featured editor, the only real thing I use in comparison to even notepad would be the syntax highlighting. I know what I'm doing usually, I don't want silly bloated tools to get in my way.
They are not stupid. They won't start filtering results unless they manage to sweep Google under the rug.
weill go on and BING for "Microsoft word torrent" and see for yourself who's the winner
Wanting to torrent Microsoft Office would indicate a loser, not a winner.
FWIW, both Google and Bing gave lengthy lists of results to the search. The results from Bing seemed to have more malware indicators like "crakz" in their titles, but the torrents from both are probably all unclean.
Anyone who downloads and installs cracked software from a torrent deserves the consequences - no matter what search engine was used to find it. Alas, the resulting botnet/worm/whatever pestilence may cause collateral suffering for the rest of us.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Nope, I pretty much typed what I intended to. Unless I misunderstood your point.
Furthermore, this is boosted by the fact that by the time the legal system remedies the illegal actions, the competitors who Microsoft "cut of the air supply" to have long since been bankrupted - so the legal remedy is kind of moot. They pay a fine, but they still have a monopoly in the new market because they destroyed all the competitors long before the case was actually heard in court - because it took five years to get there.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Microsoft exploited it with, tada, a better product.
Do you really think a superior notification sound made people buy Windows ?
Squirrel!
I like their image search, the vid thing is cool, and the travel wizard is quick and easy even if just for guestimate trips. I see it as another resource but not a Google search, email, or online doc replacement.
Your post makes absolutely no sense. And it's wrong.
:) ...
davecb5620@gmail.com
...but there might be a better word to describe it: collusion. Microsoft and their "partners", the companies and people they haven't yet discarded, will compete at any cost, even if that means talking trash about the competition. And when they talk trash, they "get the facts".
What you describe, is a small fraction of the many companies MS has trashed using collusion. In most cases, they collude with the developers. The developers may or may not be aware of what they are doing, but if they are, it's collusion. Once the developer says that "this only works on Windows", it's over. With hardware, Intel is a great example of a company that colluded with MS to establish a leading market position. Intel helped MS establish the OEM installation of Windows, foreclosing the choice of another operating system.
What concerns me the most about Microsoft is their notion that people shouldn't even know they have a choice other than Microsoft products. Most people who are not into computers have no idea that they have a choice of an operating system. Macs appear foreign to them until they try them. Thanks to the iPod, many more people have heard of Apple, but most people still use their iPod with their PC. Linux is alien to most people I talk to. I have to say it a couple of times for them to hear it because they have never heard the word before.
Foreclosure of choice, even knowledge of choice is the strategy to they exhibit the most. That is what Microsoft marketing does, but they do it with collusion.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
I run a web site and have had robots.txt request that msnbot not index my site. So far as I can tell from my access logs, msnbot and its relatives (media, and others) respect this request.
Needless to say, I was surprised when I suddenly started getting references from Bing queries. That simply shouldn't be. I've expelled the stench of Microsoft from my servers. I prefer quality over quantity, and don't care to have Microsoft benefit from anything I put my heart and sole into. So how did Microsoft index my pages?
My first thought what that they have another bot. Yet there is no reference to a bing*bot in my logs. And as I said, msnbot* isn't identifying itself if it's ignoring robots.txt. So, if I were being denied indexing access to the best sites on a given topic, but wanted to index them anyway, how would I go about it?
Well, I'd probably start off by going through a bunch of blogs with something that could understand the context - much like the recent Google Wave demonstration with respect to their new context sensitive spell checker. A lot of blogs link back to my site for detailed information and as a primary source. So if someone queries Bing with regard to this subject matter, then the indexed pages' links to my site could be used to suggest it as a primary source, thus my site would appear in the results, perhaps even higher than the blogs references it.
Thus, Microsoft can circumvent my desire to not have them index my site - and I see little that I can do to change that. Their support page says that site administrators can have some control, but only if they have an MSN Live login - which isn't going to happen.
Needless to say, I'm not at all happy about this, and will be working in some of my free time to see to it that anyone coming in from Bing are rerouted elsewhere. You couldn't pay me to use a Microsoft product. (I overwrote my final MS partition at the stroke of midnight, January 1, 2000, and have refused to use their products since, much to the headache of the HR department. Anything not available on FreeBSD, Linux, or Mac OS/X isn't necessary.) Microsoft will pay for this overstepping of bounds.
'co-founder Sergey Brin is so rattled by the launch of Microsoft's rival search engine that he has assembled a team of top engineers to work on urgent upgrades to his Web service'
.. Web, Images, Videos, Shopping, News, Maps and More. Apart from the layout, I can see little difference. What must have happened is that Sergey invented time travel and went forward in time and stole Bings innovation .. :)
What did Sergey Brin say when he was contacted by the NY Post. Did he confirm that he was 'rattled'? Did he deny he has 'assembled a team of top engineers' in response to Bing? Where and when exactly did this meeting take place. Who exactly attended?
'While Bing is presented differently from Google -- with a colorful home page and easy-to-navigate search categories compared with Google's stark white page and search box -- there is little difference between the two when it comes to searching for simple terms'
I can't for the life of me see how he describes Google as lacking easy-to-navigate search categories and Bing not having a search box. Across the top of Google.com I see Web, Images, Video, Maps, News, Shopping, Mail and more.
As compared to BINGs
--
slashdot, you have disgraced yourselves yet again
Does it run in WINE?
sudo apt-get lost
You have NO IDEA what "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" means!
Think of a car. It's got four wheels. Wheels need tires, which are made of Vulcanized rubber. Dupont makes Vulcanized rubber for tires. Some other company comes along and makes better rubber for tires. So Dupont now "Embraces" the new type of rubber so that the original company gets tired and starts making balloons.
Red balloons, Blue balloons require different compounds for coloring. Different colors, like crayons come in 8, 24, and 72-packs. I always liked the 72 packs because they came with a crayon sharpener. Seriously, how cool is that?
I once saw a car painted so that it looked like it was painted with crayons. It even had a crayon-sharpener on the back trunk! (Where the key was hidden) It was so cool it...
Wait a minute.... Where was I going with this?
/Sigh/
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Maybe someone should set the text of Brin's ranting and raving to the clip from Valkyrie like they did for The Downfall of Agile Hitler.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
... I clicked on one of the image hotspots on the Bing homepage, and Bing prompted me to install Silverlight.
Oh.. I get it... another demonstration of Microsoft's inability to NOT leverage platform.
Fail.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I never understood the people relying solely on google ranking to do their business. The day their ranking tanked for whatever reason, they had/have to close down.
I certainly don't understand an entire generation of new web useres mistaking Google for the Internet.
I like Google for the uncluttered interface and I like clusty.com for the grouped results branches.
Beyond that, search is search to me and I will use whatever machine gives me results I'm satisfied with. Most of the time that is Google.
Google itself OTOH is way more than just search by now. It's a massive counterpart to MS - a value in itself - a huge supporter of FOSS, a mobile OS vendor about to crack open the 80s style proprietary lockdown of the mobile market ('Android' anyone?) and it has a wide range of free webapps and services that actually work on all plattforms and not just some Active X enabled proprietary MS browser.
Bottom line:
As long as MS has the OS market in a firm monopolistic grip I'm shooing everyone I know away from b*ng and to other engines like Google or Clusty - better b*ng results be damned. They aren't that much better to just keep on lubeing up and bending over for MS.
My 2 Eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I heard a rumor that MS was seeding the blogosphere with negative publicity regarding Google and talking up it's own late-to-the-party Bing. That's just a rumor mind, so I don't have to produce any actual evidence .. :)
When Win98 was the most popular desktop OS, Linux users everywhere realized the general public thought that computer crashes and frequent reboots were a normal, inherent part of operating a computer. They were not, and Linux proved that, but there is/was widespread ignorance about these things and the general public continued to buy Windows
When windows 98 was the most popular Desktop OS, it was also the best desktop OS that would run on commodity hardware. Remember, The era of Win 98 was 1998 to 2000, at which point the state of the art Linux Distro was Red Hat 6, which had little or no support for a staggering amount of hardware. Want to use a win modem, or a webcam, or a USB printer? Best stick with win 98 then. Sure, Red Hat never crashed, but what use was that if my 56k modem didn't work?
Obviously things are better now, but don't go looking back with rose tinted glasses. The first Linux distro I ever used was Slackware 3.something, back in the mid-nineties, so I was perfectly aware that there were better alternatives out there, but I didn't switch to a Linux desktop completely till Red Hat 9, because there was always some show stopper of a problem with my hardware.
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
Microsoft purchased FAST Search and Transfer last year (here is a 'welcome page' for existing FAST customers). I had assumed that Bing is a specific implementation of the FAST technology, but I could very well be wrong. But if I'm right, then Sergey Brin doesn't have a whole lot of homework to do.
I've no idea about Gtk there, but what's wrong with Qt grid?
I think the Qt grid is slow and feels mushy. It just didn't feel right.
Erm, are you seriously saying that wxWidgets offer better widgets than Qt? esp. grid?..
You know, actually, I really do think wxWidgets offers better widgets than Qt. I will concede that I'm biased towards wxWidgets from the get go because I think its containment and event models works way more intuitively than Qt does and so its easier for me to discover the capabilities of wxWidgets forms.
You totally lose me there, given that native Win32 controls are very limited (they don't include dockable toolbars, for example, nor a proper grid). Comparing to VCL or WinForms would be more reasonable, though even then I don't see what they can offer that Qt does not.
That's true but the native Win32 controls are pretty darned fast and for read only purposes you can do pretty well with using the ListView as a poor man's grid. But above the thing I like the most about Win32 native is how easy it actually is to roll your own widget and use it. But the a lot of the native components do offer a lot. The listbox, textbox, are pretty good at what they do. And, above all, the common file dialogs in Vista are leagues beyond what Qt offers.
I can't stand WPF because it requires a managed framework and its slow as molasses.
This is my sig.
If I was to search for something in Microsoft's search engine, I know they are going to mess with the results to favor what ever stupid marketing initiative or agenda they have.
I use emacs to code, while emacs is a heavily featured editor, the only real thing I use in comparison to even notepad would be the syntax highlighting
Well, there's a lot of dumb things notepad does... might I recommend textpad, if you are doing the Linux way in Windows? It's roughly comparable to rather good Kate.
I don't want silly bloated tools to get in my way.
Being able to hot track compile errors back to the text, and, debug the source in context, are the two winners for me. The third is having a good project redistributable. I really liked the way KDevelop would roll my solution into a source tarball with all the make install conventions and stuff that are common in Unix. I do not want to learn the ins and outs of autoconf any more than I want to understand the guts of an msi.
Incidentally, I really like the way debugging worked on Linux better with KDevelop than I did Visual C++. KDevelop let you change your code while you were running your project, and Visual C++ decides these days to lock you out. Drives me nuts. But KDevelop completely hit the rocks with the transition to KDE 4 and they still haven't gotten all the holes out of the boat yet. Other C++ environments in Linux aren't quite as good. The Qt one has promise, but it lacks some key polish. I've never been happy with Eclipse and C++, for sure.
This is my sig.
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What you're missing is that this is a deliberate strategy on Microsoft's part that served them well for many, many years. For a long time, Microsoft sought to have the second best product in any given category. Then they would just sit there and wait for the best product to get lazy or stagnant and come in and sweep up the remnants. They did this again and again and again in the late 80's and 90's, and it worked every single time, because eventually the competition would trip up leaving the market open for Microsoft.
Examples?
The problem with this strategy is it only works when your competition slacks off. And nowadays Microsoft's competition--i.e. Google and Apple--aren't slacking off. At least Not Yet.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
You do know that Microsoft wrote OS/2 for IBM? And basically sabotaged it when they started working on Windows 3.0. IBM basically had to rewrite OS/2 themselves because it was so crappy. And Microsoft was first out the door with Windows 95 apps by months compared to Lotus and Wordperfect. Why? They were using secret API's the others had no access to. Believe me, the Microsoft of the 90's cheated at every opportunity to get where they were. They were cool in the 80's. Cheaters in the 90's and just plain old incompetent this decade. Maybe they are turning the corner with Bing and Windows 7. Who knows?
Yeah, and that's why every Linux distro completely ignores things such as... RDP
Assuming you mean Remote Desktop Protocol, my Kubuntu system has krdc installed by default, which handles RDP quite well (and I would say is a better program than the regular Windows client), and there's an RDP server available, though not installed by default.
Last I checked, Microsoft was mortally afraid of Google for some reason, and in turn, chairs were in fear for their lives.
There is something I really despise about Microsoft. It's not their success - I admire anyone who succeeds at honest business. Microsoft succeeded by being underhanded, deceptive, and downright dishonest. They ripped off QDos, they ripped off Mosaic, and they bullied resellers. Ever since they realized they peaked they have been bullying customers with their activation schemes. They rip off "partners" all the time (Stacker, Intuit, etc. - fortunately Intuit not only survived but they stayed on top of their game).
But want to know what my biggest beef with Microsoft is? It is not their software quality, even though all too often it is abysmal. It is not their pricing, even though it's clear that they are now abusing their monopoly position (ever since they effectively killed off Wordperfect/Corel office and Lotus Smartsuite, Microsoft Office has increased in price by 300% to 400%). Windows has increased by >100% (athough you can still get the OEM version fairly cheaply - the ONLY reason though, is so M$ can maintain their abusive monopoly). Their licensing is entirely one-sided and they no longer honor any 30-day money-back guarantee, and they are large enough to fight your right of first sale vs. EULA claims.
Here is the problem with a EULA: software makers refuse to issue refunds. Software products sold off-the-shelf are commodity goods, so right of sale applies. You can do what you want with the software (aside from violate copyright law outside of Fair Use) because you OWN that copy. Microsoft does their best via propoganda and through technical measures to brainwash you to believe otherwise.
Now, on to my single biggest problem with Microsoft: They have a core business. Fine, that's great and god bless them for it. However, like a dog, it's not in the having but in the getting. If they see you having any measure of success in another, unrelated market, they consider that market theirs. They must enter that market and destroy you, or even just destroy you if they have no interest in that market. they cannot be satisfied with their position at the top of the mountain but they must stomp down even the pawns of the marketplace. They might approach you with partnerships with the idea of stealing your "IP" and then turn around and stab you in the back, or they might spread FUD just to try to discredit you.
What is their beef with Google? Microsoft obviously never cared about search engines, free software, and quality, enterprise-quality free email before Google went big with them. Even though "cloud computing" is obviously a huge fatal mistake for users requiring uptime and guarantee that their data will remain owned by themselves, Microsoft sees it as essential that they knock down Google, and have been trying desperately to do so.
This is despite that many have decided, consciously or subconsciously, that Microsoft does not belong in those markets, that they'll go to anyone who will do the job well and is NOT Microsoft. Google did well with their initial "do no evil" philosophy. Now Microsoft has been trying desperately with MSN Search, Live! search, trying to buy Yahoo, and now, "Bing," which sounds like the subject of a Monty Python or SNL skit.
As I said, with a stupid dog, it's not in the having, but in the getting. They see Google succeeding amazingly well in a market they never cared about but now consider essential even though they have proven many times that they cannot do the job well. Why can they not be happy with running 94% of the world's desktop computers and a good portion of embedded devices such as automobiles ECM/BCM interfaces, GPSes, game consoles, and telephones, not to mention the office suites on most of the applicable devices? Why is that not enough? They can't even do THAT well, but people keep buying Microsoft even though they hate Microsoft products.
There is room for other players to be at the top of other segments of
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
The problem with that approach is that unscrupulous commercial sites will want to get pageviews by pretending to be a research site.
I am officially gone from
I suppose everybody that reads your post and finds it interesting will head over to the blind search and do their own test. I know I did. Score: Google 3, Bing 3, Yahoo 4. Weird.
The only thing I've learned here is how much I miss the old Dogpile with its results broken out by search engine, the old Northern Light with its ability to parse URLs so wonderfully and the way HotBot just seemed, back in the day, to find stuff.
Anybody know a good URL search engine, one that allows me to search for text strings within URLs, including specifying at what level in the URL the string appears? I *really* miss Northern Light; I hope some current search engine can do the same and I just don't know how to use it.
[...] then attempted to extinguish it but Sun go the upper hand. Then end result was close to a multi-billion dollar judgment against Microsoft.
That's embrace, extend, extinguish. You are talking in terms of proprietary vendor lock in.
I bet Bill Gates paid it out the notes he had in his wallet.
Gambas doesn't even match VB 6. And what I mean by VB is an all in one integrated RAD development environment where Forms, Event Handling are built into the one thing. That pretty much means, Gambas...
Lazarus fulfills this requirement excellently.
You're also making a stretch to consider vendor lock-in strategies to be marketing. Marketing is finding out what your customers need, and letting your customers know that you can provide something they want
Marketing is creating a market for your product. You can do that by filling a need, or by creating a need.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I'm not personally convinced that the Google engine is really that good, in fact by design it's all but worthless for certain types of query.
Yep. These days you can search for a term in Google, even put the term in quotes and you get results that do not contain the literal string you searched for. Ok you think, the web is dynamic and maybe it's changed since Google indexed it. So you check the cache and it's not there either.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
"Why buy 2nd best or the oddball, when Microsoft sold you everything you needed, AND EVERYONE else used MS products (compatibility)?"
Just a quick note: you're dangerously close to saying "nobody chose 1-2-3 because nobody chose 1-2-3"
Compatibility with the dominant platform doesn't become an issue until a vendor becomes dominant. In my opinion, it was by introducing cheap plastic crap that barely worked when the prevailing software sales strategy was to introduce expensive whizbang stuff that worked well.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
You guys always crack me up. You think there is a real difference between democrat and republican politicians in this day and age?! Fighting amongst yourselves is exactly what the international banksters that own the banks that own the banks want you to do.
If your politician isn't standing up and screaming, "Hey, quit printing money out of thin air and charging us interest on it you bastards!", then they are all part of the same problem. Having people tied to the government determine the cost of fiat money (interest rates) is a complete recipe for disaster. The last 35 years are proof of this. The US has over 11 TRILLION dollars in debt and imports more than it exports. You think having a different political party in ANY of the branches of government is going to help this?
And don't start with the BS about "% of GDP", because the GDP is made up in large part from consumer debt. But please, continue your squabbling, it makes you good global citizens.
I tried Mr. Crosby's offering and was NOT impressed. Barney (and his friend Mr. Smith) has nothing to worry about.
Free Martian Whores!
Google her for a while, then Bing her until she Yahoo!s.
I do not want to learn the ins and outs of autoconf any more than I want to understand the guts of an msi.
Wow, we're venturing off-topic! Anyway, I resisted autoconf for the longest time, but it turned out to be exceedingly easy to set up. I ran a command found in the autoconf info page to create all the necessary files and scan my source code for dependencies, edited configure.ac, and that was it. Now running "make dist" creates an appropriate-name tarball.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The problem with marketers is that they will not allow this to happen or at least they will do their best to break into the "searches for research or information/informative sites". If there is one thing that marketers cannot stand then it is potential consumers (and everyone with a credit card and a pulse is a potential consumer) who escape their web of advertising. Once people figure out that "research/information" searches don't have advertising which one(s) do you think they will use? No, the goal of marketers is to bombard you with advertising everywhere they can and as often as they can until you are sick of them; so it follows then that they cannot permit an empty space to go unfilled with advertisements for any reason, even "research/information".
I came across google sponsoring bing during an image search, i took a screen capture, obviously google isnt THAT scared if they took microsofts money.. Image Here
I didnt believe that it could be as good as it is for porn video searching. Thats pretty freaking sweet. Mouse over to see a preview... VERY nice!
Google has definately met its match in the video search arena, and the killer thing is that for google to catch up it seems like they will be making their own youtube less relevant in the process, allowing competitors to be more easily visible.
"His name was James Damore."
Sheesh, you may want to reconsider your search terms when doing video/image searches.
Hush now. Back to sleep. Everything is fine.
-FL
But it's a 25 year old pop culture icon that nearly every one of us here gets. Quite a few other people as well. They could do worse. I mean the 1984 commercial was aimed at the literati that had bothered to read 1984. George Orwell was hardly mainstream at the time.
Why bother
good point but that is behind the scenes and even the exposed court documents don't make it into general public knowledge. It's the PR tricks that people see and hear day in and day out from all over the place. Just like this dumb story trying to get people to believe MS Live Search....MS BING has Google panicking. I would put their skills as you suggested, Distribution channel control, Marketing(PR, paid for research, articles, ads and public statements), Software.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I generally use Wikipedia to search for a company's website, rather than Google; it may be inaccurate for some things, but it's pretty much 100% accurate for that.
(1)DOCOMEFROM!2~.2'~#1WHILE:1<-"'?.1$.2'~'"':1/.1$.2'~#0"$#65535'"$"'"'&.1$.2'~'#0$#65535'"$#0'~#32767$#1"
What I would like to see Google do (and all the other search engines too for that matter), is create an option and associated algorithm to break out web searches into two fundamental/gross search categories:
That's already starting to be done on google.com. Click 'Show Options' and click the links on the left to filter the results. I know the links look like some ads, but hey, at least they started.
And for the queries that I like to make, it doesn't do any better job of finding things than the older MS search did.
I'd also like an example to prove that. Before Google, Altavista was generally considered the best search engine. Google would generally find the result you wanted (something good enough to to stop you from searching more) within the first 20 results whereas AV would take up to 200. It was a straight up order-of-magnitude improvement!
They even had the balls to include that "I feel lucky" button! Having an appropriate (let alone the best) result come back as the first page was pretty rare back when Google launched its beta all those years ago!
Nick
you'll see.
Read radical news here
(and everyone with a credit card and a pulse is a potential consumer)
Wow, you know some picky marketers...
IS google. Just in case you didn't know.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Why is it that the state of the art in FOSS Office applications still has less features than Office 2000?
Quantity is not important in itself.
Why is that Linux uses Samba for File / Print?
Network printing does not have to be Samba-based. Even then, support for Windows network is a major strength, is it not? We don't see Windows implementing ssh, Linux network mounts, reading ext*, or anything to make file transfer easier.
Why is it that Linux clones TrueType fonts? If fonts were so easy, why can't FOSS innovate a better font system?
Again, why not support it if there are literally tens of thousands of TTF fonts already?
Hey, I agree that Windows XP has better user interface than Linux, even to this day. Compared to latest KDE, it is fast, simple, mostly bug-free. But it is already behind on features, and, IMHO, interface is the strongest point of Vista, which is just sad.
Maybe they are turning the corner with Bing and Windows 7.
Windows 7 is just Vista with better marketing.
IE was decent, and it was shipped with Windows. That is what killed Netscape. If people had a computer with just an OS, and had to choose a browser at the time, they almost invariably went with Netscape. It was the bundling of IE with Windows that killed off competitors.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I wouldn't call their competitors incompetant - but I would call them absent.
You do realize that, before Google was king, there were litterally hundreds of search providers. And compared to Google, they all sucked.
Were you not around when the best way to find what you were looking for was to hit up 3 or 4 search engines? Engines like Altavista, Excite, and Yahoo were the best, but none of them could be relied upon solely. It was so bad, my favorite website at the time was DogPile.com, which was a search engine search engine. They would search 20+ search engines for your query, and flood you with the results. While it wasn't very good at finding what you wanted in context, it at least put all the results in one place for you to dig through.
Then Google came along, and crushed them. They started with a better search ranking system than anybody else had. Most search engines at the time just used the number of keywords on the page for relevance ranking, which led to websites with "invisible" text at the bottom of the page filled with thousands of keywords, relevevant and irrelevant, repeated over and over. Google's "linked to by other websites" vastly improved the quality of the search results, and as they gained popularity they were able to garner better advertising, and thus make more money to expand their web-crawling enterprises.
For the past four or five years, I have used one search engine and have had consistantly good results. Google isn't the best because there is no competition, that's backwards. In fact there has been no competition the last few years because Google is far and a way the best. Yahoo has managed hold their head above water, but they've had to move away from search being their big money maker. MS has always provided their search function as an additional service, it was never a big money maker for them.
There are only two ways Google can loose their search engine dominance: a "black swan" shows up with vastly improved search service from out in left field, or a competitor with enough clout releases a moderately better product and markets the hell out of it. Microsoft actually has a decent chance at both, but the latter is far more likely, and they are about the only ones in the market right now with the clout, capitol, and name recognition to pull that off.
Frankly, I hope Bing is better than Google, cause I'll start using it and be getting better search results. :)
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Wow, we're venturing off-topic!
For what its worth, I rebooted from Vista into Ubuntu Linux this morning because hands down Linux does ISO burning better.
Anyway, I resisted autoconf for the longest time, but it turned out to be exceedingly easy to set up
I'll have to try that out. And, environment plays in tools... The one thing that makes Linux work well is that the stdout and stdin ports still work in GUI mode so you can dump a lot of instrumentation out to the console as you debug your app. Also, although PowerShell has so much promise, I still prefer bash.
This is my sig.
Teoma.
I loved Teoma. It was the best search engine I had ever used. It provided more useful results for me than when using Google, so I used it instead. I always found something that related to the intersection of my search terms as opposed to pages that simply contained them. Alas, Teoma was absorbed by Ask.com (I think) but it's search algorithm was not replicated but that which assimilated it.
I love Google's ease of use, the collection of apps (mail, maps, image search) but I still long for the essential relevancy that Teoma provided. Google is useful but I find it's page ranking to be far from the best method, in my experience as a user.
Finally, healthy ecosystems (biological or economic) have diversity. Microsoft's expansion into yet another facet of our information age is NOT competition. It is the expansion of a company with an unhealthy monopoly into other activities which support the existing monopoly. Our information age is sick because of our society's inability to reign in Microsoft.
Whereas an operating system CAN be made very secure, a search engine will always be open to manipulation of search ranking.
Personally, I think we certainly do need more competition in this field. The features that Bing seems to bring to the table seems more like bling than actually useful features, but none the less, it might get Google to actually improve their service.
My main gripe today is that with any search engine you will find 2000000 hits, or none. Not often something in between. Why? Because first thing the search engine does after you feed it your query, is ignore most of the important parts and spew nonsense result at you as a result. So you add more words to limit the query, probably picking the other word for the same thing (ie not the one the author of the page you're looking for used) and so you miss the pages you want.
An example... put "Get(Set(go))" nicely quoted into Google, and it will happy mash it down to "get" "set" "go", ignoring everything that was important (caps and parenthesis) to make the query specific and useful.
Imagine something like "near" (within 20 words, maybe), "exact" that actually took into account caps and non-alphabetic characters, or dream of all dreams "regexp" to search with:
("X" near "Y") and (regexp "z+" near (exact "/." or "Slashdot")) and fuzzy "brauser setings" and synonym "save"
What if you could drop something like that into Google? You would actually be able to find what you needed! I'm not saying this should be a default search mode. Natural language parsing would be a nicer default one. But even the simplest thing like "search for this exact string (caps, strange characters and all)" isn't available today, even in advanced mode!
Now I know there are search engines out there that actually have/had parts of these features (like one which I found that could do regexp, but used it only to broaden the search, not limit it, making it useless). But I have yet to find one that actually works well. Feel free to point me at one if you know one.
Google was a Black Swan -- that's why I wouldn't even count Altavista and others that were present before Google. With the metadata/keyword based ranking they used it was trivial to game the system -- so Google overtook them just by being there. The other thing Google were the first to figure out: monetizing search. Nobody was able to make money off it until they showed the way.
Having said that, you don't necessarily need a black swan to beat google. It'll help, but it might not be required. It'll prpbably just take more dogged persistence. Time will tell.
An example of said persistence: Having deep enough pockets to go the distance. Being able to get partnerships with as many vendors as possible to set your search as the default search on their device/service/whatever. That's half the fight right there. Because without clicks, you're missing the feedback you need to tune your results (never mind the revenue it generates). And without that, you're never going to get better results. So you have to parner with OEMS, carriers (or smartphone makers), browser makers, DNS providers (for your typical DNS erros when an address can't be found -- it's usually a search on the address you're looking up). etc. All this takes persistence and deep pockets. Hence, nobody other than MS is in a position to challenge Google.
Yes. They're a marketing company that has some tech leanings - it's been this way for as long as I've been into computers (the early 80's)
Wake up. You can tell this with a straight face. As bad as Microsoft seems to some people, they are still a technical company. Vista also proved that their marketing sucked more than their actual technical strength.
Minor point, but I forgot to mention the practice of buying keyword search terms.
This was the way all search engines before Google made money. You bought your ranking on the search engine
Google's results were purely a result of their algorithm applied to their crawled websites. It was impossible to purchase search engine rankings - instead they sold adds at the top and sides of the results, not in the results themselves, which was a much more honest way to go about it. So, Google's results were more accurate for that reason as well, and so more trustworthy.
All of this contributed to their crushing defeat of the search engine market, and at the same time made them one of the most trusted well-known companies in the world.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Exactly, it sounds like the writer spoke to his anonymous fairy god mother and she told him what he wanted to hear. No fact just some anonymous person said Sergey is uber scared. The rest of B Gates buddies (read Murdoch, Buffet) use this BS story from a reputable paper as some sort of evidence to the fact it must be true. I'm just glad they only pull this shit for tech related subject and not world news, boy that would suck!
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
Linux distributions (or even MacOS for that matter) have to live in a
world that has been dominated by MS-DOS and it's decendants quite
possibly since before you were born. It's not practical or pragmatic
to just try to pretend that WinDOS PC's don't exist and that we don't
have to interact with them.
Yes, that's what Samba is for: dealing with that lone XP machine on
the home network that is primarily there due to Apple's brand of
vendorlock (namely the iphone).
This theme plays itself out in the corporate world where Microsoft
Office has managed to entrench itself along with Exchange.
MacOS can connect to CIFS shares not because Microsoft's technology is great but because it is pervasive and unavoidable.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Microsoft Office won by being associated with Microsoft at at time when
corporations thought it was a good idea to get everything from one vendor.
What you had to do to get a print preview out of Word Perfect really had
nothing to do with it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> You mean the marketing thing they need to do because they're incapable of engineering something good themselves?
>
> Uh, for the longest time, KDE and Gnome both looked a hell of a lot more like Windows 95 than they did Macintosh. Bottom
Linux developers never claimed to be "defenders of innovation". Also, it doesn't matter quite so much
how something LOOKS but how it WORKS. Making a Unix desktop "look" like any version of MacOS is the easy
part. That was quite possible even before KDE or GNOME.
The first Linux "Windows knockoffs" were nothing more than themes for existing window managers.
> line is, most of the people that bitch about Microsoft's engineering are the losers that claim that their product was ...nice empty rhetoric. Funny how no one really ever backs it up with details.
> better but they were somehow wronged. 9 times out of 10, their product sucked in some area and Microsoft exploited it with,
> tada, a better product.
What you have below is just more detailed version of the same (empty rhetoric)
Us "losers" would have prefered to keep on using our "preferred" products.
In a free and open market, there's no good reason that "losers" shouldn't
be able to do just that.
This is one important area where cars differ dramatically from software.
The difference between a monopoly and a market leader is that you can ignore a market leader.
> Right off the wheel, I would say that if Microsoft is so terrible, why is no one in the FOSS movement able to come up with an IDE consistently as good as Visual Studio?
>
> Why is it that the state of the art in FOSS Office applications still has less features than Office 2000?
>
How is that exactly?
In my estimation, Office applications in general haven't had any meaningful new features since Microsoft unseated WordPerfect.
>
> Why is it that Windows 3.1 GDI is still an all around better render / print system than just about anything Linux has put out, until Cairo...
>
I will keep that in mind as I try to figure out how to get my multifunction printer
to print across the network under Windows. It looks like I will have to resort to a sort
of "classic Unix" approach.
>
> Why is it that Linux clones TrueType fonts? If fonts were so easy, why can't FOSS innovate a better font system?
>
Why throw out good data? That's much like saying we should ignore JPEG or h264.
>
> Why is that Linux uses Samba for File / Print? If networking were so easy, one would think Linux would have its own
> open and unique protocol, and just publish a Windows client driver like Novell did for IPX/SPX based file / print clients.
> And to think Novell got a client working in DOS...
>
No. WINDOWS uses CIFS for printing.
Creating special drivers for printing under Windows is probably not very maintainable.
>
> If Microsoft is such a shoddy company, where's the VB for Linux?
>
???
>
> If I look around Linux, the only big thing that's innovative is KDE 4.
>
I am not concerned with mindless marketing rhetoric. I just want to
get stuff done. Mindless change for the sake of creating version churn
and enabling a constant stream of corporate revenue doesn't really add
to that.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Go figure!
Now... to click or not to click? The last time I clicked a link like that it was Goatse.
This wasn't marketing, it was IBM looking for someone to build an OS for them. Their first choice, Digital, rejected them.
That would be Digital Research (maker of CP/M), not Digital Equipment Corp, the minicomputer maker.
In the end, it was Netscape creating a bloated, inefficient browser that killed them.
I thought it was more that Microsoft bundled IE with the OS. Besides, Netscape didn't die, they just became Firefox.
Have you read my blog lately?
As with many companies, it was a convergence of issues that killed Netscape, not one single reason. If Netscape had managed to diversify away from a single product, if Microsoft hadn't bundled IE with Windows, if Netscape had continued to be a significantly better browser, then they wouldn't have died. But they didn't manage any of these, and so they died.
Qxe4
I tried out the search engine linked above (sitetruth.com).
I understand that it's alpha, but I'm seriously under-impressed. It gave my site a negative rating for two things. One - no street address on the site - there is actually a full address at the bottom of every single page on the site. Two - no valid secure certificate - Uh, yeah. I don't sell anything, nor do I collect any information from users. Why should I have an SSL cert? WTF?
I think that if you call it "sitetruth", it should have some truth in it.
IE was decent, and it was shipped with Windows. That is what killed Netscape. If people had a computer with just an OS, and had to choose a browser at the time, they almost invariably went with Netscape. It was the bundling of IE with Windows that killed off competitors.
The story of Netscape's failure is well-repeated here. They had a source code tree that regularly didn't compile, so their releases were made when their tree actually compiled.
The thing to remember is that the later versions of Netscape were really horrible. Do you remember when they released Netscape 6? I tried it, and was bloated garbage. A few months later, I realized that IE crashed significantly less then Netscape 4, so I switched.
Frankly, if later versions of Netscape had been a decent browser, they could have figured out how to stay in business.
No, I will not work for your startup
...is an oxymoron.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Really? So you know for a fact that "these people" dismiss that explanation from Microsoft? How do you know exactly what "these people" would say about Microsoft?
Clever signature text goes here.
OK punter, put this in your Google: sony mz 700 manual
First search I did today, looking for the manual for my mini disk player. Sony was in the search... you have to look 50 or more hits down to find Sony. It is quicker to go to Sony and sift through there web site than to do a Google search.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
When Win98 was the most popular desktop OS, Linux users everywhere realized the general public thought that computer crashes and frequent reboots were a normal, inherent part of operating a computer. They were not, and Linux proved that, but there is/was widespread ignorance about these things and the general public continued to buy Windows When windows 98 was the most popular Desktop OS, it was also the best desktop OS that would run on commodity hardware. Remember, The era of Win 98 was 1998 to 2000, at which point the state of the art Linux Distro was Red Hat 6, which had little or no support for a staggering amount of hardware. Want to use a win modem, or a webcam, or a USB printer? Best stick with win 98 then. Sure, Red Hat never crashed, but what use was that if my 56k modem didn't work? Obviously things are better now, but don't go looking back with rose tinted glasses. The first Linux distro I ever used was Slackware 3.something, back in the mid-nineties, so I was perfectly aware that there were better alternatives out there, but I didn't switch to a Linux desktop completely till Red Hat 9, because there was always some show stopper of a problem with my hardware.
I became interested in Linux in 1997 and have been using it ever since. I know what you mean, and I dealt with it by picking hardware for my OS of choice rather than the more haphazard approach of hoping that my OS of choice will run on random hardware which I did not choose. For me, that was the simple solution. It was particularly easy because I strongly prefer to build systems from parts so I had to make decisions about the hardware anyway; Linux support was just another criteria.
I remember those days too, things like using a calculator to figure out my XFree86 (at the time it was not yet Xorg) modelines. The problem you mention wasn't such a showstopper because especially ten years ago, people who knew their way around a Linux system were a rather self-selecting group. They were the folks who really enjoyed computing and didn't consider it a chore to be more involved in their own experience. Therefore, they tended to be very comfortable with things like deliberate selection of hardware and building their own systems etc. To use a tired old car analogy, few people would be surprised if a professional mechanic who really loves his work has made more modifications to his car than the average person and had no difficulty selecting the correct parts with which to make them.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Is it fair to say that applets, beans, and swing are different versions of the same thing?
Applets are a method for embedding a Java component into a web page. Microsoft equivalent would be ActiveX or Silverlight.
Beans are a method to create components that can be manipulated by designers. Basically, Sun's answer to Microsoft's graphical Visual Basic GUI builders.
Swing is the Java GUI API. The windows equivalent would be the win32 MFC GUI classes, or whatever C#'s GUI API is.
An Applet could be assembled out of Beans which use the Swing API. In no way did one of these replace any of the others.