Using numbers that close to each other is pretty meaningless as the number of results returned by Google is an estimate on the number of documents it has in its index.
Those estimates can easily be off by a factor of 10.
But that's exactly the problem: Yahoo is a media company. Good media companies are able to generate plenty of good content at the lowest cost. At the same time, good media companies do a good job monetizing their content, whether through advertising, subscriptions, value-add, etc.
Yahoo does a poor job doing both. They have tons of content creators and developers working on each property. For example, Yahoo! Finance has roughly 700 people working on that aspect of the portal alone. Yahoo's efforts with Panama are a failure and they have trouble monetizing their search.
I think their poor use of resources and inability to monetize efficiently points at poor execution. Add on top of that the fact that Yang has not changed much since Semel shows that the company is continuing it's downward march.
It's commonly known that the numbers presented in terms of the number of results by all three search engines is an estimate by those engines.
In general, Google's system wildly overestimates the number of results it finds. As does Yahoo's. Try performing a search with fewer results so that you can try to reach the "end" of the results. In most cases, you'll find Google is overestimating.
I'm sorry, but I just tried both WWT and Google Sky out. I am not sure how Google Sky even compares. It doesn't do any of the nice zoom and pan effects that WWT does. There's also no way to change the imagery source, take tours, etc. There are so many more features (useful ones) in WWT. Can someone explain how the comparison is even valid between the two?
Over the last few years, Yahoo! has turned into a media company while their technology investments have lagged behind. This is easily evident in their slow improvement on search capability and their being the last major player in the system to switch to an auction model that accounts for clickthroughs (Panama).
Microsoft would not buy Yahoo! for the technology. The important parts are market share, reach, users, content, and data. Some of the applications are useful, but nothing Microsoft wouldn't be able to do on its own.
For this reason, this won't be like many other acquisitions where the technology is absorbed into the company and then the product ceases to exist. The key parts of this are the Yahoo! brand, its users, and a lot of the reason those users exist are because of the applications they use. I don't foresee any of those applications going away anytime soon.
As for engineers leaving Yahoo! The worst will probably be if some of the key researchers/engineers leave, but as I mentioned before, Yahoo! really isn't a great technology company anymore. This would not be a huge loss.
I think for Bill Gates, there are multiple ways to view open source. I'm pretty he doesn't find the idea of open source repulsive and I'm sure he understands there are many things to be learned from how OSS is developed, how communities are built around the software, etc. These are things he doesn't view as a threat to Microsoft but are things that he probably feels the company can learn from. After all, all engineers like learning new methods and understanding processes.
So what is it about OSS that Bill Gates dislikes so much? The business model. OSS threatens Microsoft via its business model and this is what he actively attempts to show as inferior to the closed-source way of doing things.
I think once this distinction between business model and engineering are taken into account, his views are relatively easy to understand.
The problem isn't necessarily the money. It's the culture and attitude toward IP in China. I know a bunch of rich kids in China and most of them have never bought a DVD in their life. They download all their software, movies, etc.
Interesting post... you mention "capital" as part of real economic wealth. Land and labor I understand. Is capital simply any physical good a person owns? Is the value of that capital simply its intrinsic value plus labor that went into producing it?
Something that I rarely see in these Vista discussions is the fact that Vista introduces this pretty neat file versioning system. Yes, you can run your entire home directory off CVS if you want. What's nice about the whole way it's done in Vista is that it is neatly integrated into the entire system and you can quickly and easily move between versions of files. Why isn't this a more highly touted feature? Is it somehow not interesting to typical consumers?
Generally people bash on MS for 'innovating' by copying Microsoft's products. Isn't iTV just a clone of Windows Media Center? If not, how so? If so, is this one of the first instances of Apple copying Microsoft? Not trying to start a flamewar/troll here; just curious. Thanks.
I actually think it's easier to browse songs on a Zune than on an iPod. In particular, the wheel gets annoying after performing the repetitive motion of turning and turning whereas on the Zune, it's just holding the button down and watching the big letters show you where you are w/in the scrolling.
The new thing isn't the bird's eye view, but the 3D view. The bird's eye view has been around for quite some time and has always had this limitation. This is because the ability to stitch the photographs taken from the airplane seamlessly together still isn't there yet. The airplane is not shooting exactly perpendicular to the surface of the earth. Imagine a bunch of roof shingles which are the photos and now try making it seamless.
The new 3D thing is different from this and is more similar to Google Earth.
You're right on the first two accounts. The last two I think you may not have tried Microsoft's offerings recently. Microsoft has had a long history of developing APIs for developers and if you look at their live.com projects, most of them come with APIs that are not hard to use at all. I haven't really developed against either Google or Live, but just looking at both, it doesn't seem to me that one is superior over the other. As for your last point on mapping, you need to try out Live Local. I was skeptical at first, but now I don't know how the hell people even use Google Maps. Live Local has way more features, is far more useable, and provides better local search results. Live's shopping and image search imo are also better than Google's though that is slightly more subjective. The interface for those two is definitely nicer than what Google offers though I think the results are more or less the same.
Actually, Clippy was out of university research rather than MSR if I recall correctly. As for research showing up in products, it's often hard to say "exactly." But to name a few off the top of my head for sure:
- MSN Search - a lot of search technology, IR stuff
- SQL Server - database research
- Microsoft SNL (speech and natural language) - a lot of the phone system products and such as well as their speech-to-text, text-to-speech products come out of their research in these areas
Overall, in all of their products, there is actually a lot of research stuff that goes into it because MS actually spends R&D (both R and D) dollars on software correctness/verification. If you look under the literature for bug finding, software verification, or any of the above categories I mentioned (information retrieval, speech, natural language, databases) you will most definitely see papers published by MSR and you can be confident that a lot of that stuff does hit the product.
Microsoft is one of the biggest companies focused on 'R' - they have two major research labs: Microsoft Research (in Redmond) and a lab in Beijing. It's all Ph.D.'s and they are most definitely focused on research. While sometimes they have a product in mind, a lot of the stuff is pure research, very academic. They publish papers and often, their papers don't lead to products.
netvibes? I'm surprised more people aren't talking about live.com. For years I've been starting on a blank page when opening my browser, but now I'm considering starting it at live.com. It beats the hell out of Google's ig and is better than netvibes (which is also better than Google)
That's because as is typical of/., the article summary is cut and paste directly from the article itself. The paragraph in question occurs on page 3 of the article if you want to skip ahead to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Using numbers that close to each other is pretty meaningless as the number of results returned by Google is an estimate on the number of documents it has in its index.
Those estimates can easily be off by a factor of 10.
But that's exactly the problem: Yahoo is a media company. Good media companies are able to generate plenty of good content at the lowest cost. At the same time, good media companies do a good job monetizing their content, whether through advertising, subscriptions, value-add, etc.
Yahoo does a poor job doing both. They have tons of content creators and developers working on each property. For example, Yahoo! Finance has roughly 700 people working on that aspect of the portal alone. Yahoo's efforts with Panama are a failure and they have trouble monetizing their search.
I think their poor use of resources and inability to monetize efficiently points at poor execution. Add on top of that the fact that Yang has not changed much since Semel shows that the company is continuing it's downward march.
It's commonly known that the numbers presented in terms of the number of results by all three search engines is an estimate by those engines. In general, Google's system wildly overestimates the number of results it finds. As does Yahoo's. Try performing a search with fewer results so that you can try to reach the "end" of the results. In most cases, you'll find Google is overestimating.
I'm sorry, but I just tried both WWT and Google Sky out. I am not sure how Google Sky even compares. It doesn't do any of the nice zoom and pan effects that WWT does. There's also no way to change the imagery source, take tours, etc. There are so many more features (useful ones) in WWT. Can someone explain how the comparison is even valid between the two?
Over the last few years, Yahoo! has turned into a media company while their technology investments have lagged behind. This is easily evident in their slow improvement on search capability and their being the last major player in the system to switch to an auction model that accounts for clickthroughs (Panama).
Microsoft would not buy Yahoo! for the technology. The important parts are market share, reach, users, content, and data. Some of the applications are useful, but nothing Microsoft wouldn't be able to do on its own.
For this reason, this won't be like many other acquisitions where the technology is absorbed into the company and then the product ceases to exist. The key parts of this are the Yahoo! brand, its users, and a lot of the reason those users exist are because of the applications they use. I don't foresee any of those applications going away anytime soon.
As for engineers leaving Yahoo! The worst will probably be if some of the key researchers/engineers leave, but as I mentioned before, Yahoo! really isn't a great technology company anymore. This would not be a huge loss.
I think for Bill Gates, there are multiple ways to view open source. I'm pretty he doesn't find the idea of open source repulsive and I'm sure he understands there are many things to be learned from how OSS is developed, how communities are built around the software, etc. These are things he doesn't view as a threat to Microsoft but are things that he probably feels the company can learn from. After all, all engineers like learning new methods and understanding processes.
So what is it about OSS that Bill Gates dislikes so much? The business model. OSS threatens Microsoft via its business model and this is what he actively attempts to show as inferior to the closed-source way of doing things.
I think once this distinction between business model and engineering are taken into account, his views are relatively easy to understand.
Google seriously overestimates the number of results it returns.
For example, on page 1:
Results 1 - 10 of about 417,000 for 5D 09 7F B4 60 B8 FB BD D0 2B 6A A3 F2 F6 AB CA
But clicking to the end:
This isn't as obvious in other queries when the engine won't let you go past 1000 results, but in queries such as this, it's very telling.Results 471 - 473 of 473 for 5D 09 7F B4 60 B8 FB BD D0 2B 6A A3 F2 F6 AB CA
"only" is right. $50 million in revenue is not a lot in the software industry.
The problem isn't necessarily the money. It's the culture and attitude toward IP in China. I know a bunch of rich kids in China and most of them have never bought a DVD in their life. They download all their software, movies, etc.
Interesting post... you mention "capital" as part of real economic wealth. Land and labor I understand. Is capital simply any physical good a person owns? Is the value of that capital simply its intrinsic value plus labor that went into producing it?
Something that I rarely see in these Vista discussions is the fact that Vista introduces this pretty neat file versioning system. Yes, you can run your entire home directory off CVS if you want. What's nice about the whole way it's done in Vista is that it is neatly integrated into the entire system and you can quickly and easily move between versions of files. Why isn't this a more highly touted feature? Is it somehow not interesting to typical consumers?
Generally people bash on MS for 'innovating' by copying Microsoft's products. Isn't iTV just a clone of Windows Media Center? If not, how so? If so, is this one of the first instances of Apple copying Microsoft? Not trying to start a flamewar/troll here; just curious. Thanks.
I actually think it's easier to browse songs on a Zune than on an iPod. In particular, the wheel gets annoying after performing the repetitive motion of turning and turning whereas on the Zune, it's just holding the button down and watching the big letters show you where you are w/in the scrolling.
Was it running Vista?
The new thing isn't the bird's eye view, but the 3D view. The bird's eye view has been around for quite some time and has always had this limitation. This is because the ability to stitch the photographs taken from the airplane seamlessly together still isn't there yet. The airplane is not shooting exactly perpendicular to the surface of the earth. Imagine a bunch of roof shingles which are the photos and now try making it seamless.
The new 3D thing is different from this and is more similar to Google Earth.
You're right on the first two accounts. The last two I think you may not have tried Microsoft's offerings recently. Microsoft has had a long history of developing APIs for developers and if you look at their live.com projects, most of them come with APIs that are not hard to use at all. I haven't really developed against either Google or Live, but just looking at both, it doesn't seem to me that one is superior over the other. As for your last point on mapping, you need to try out Live Local. I was skeptical at first, but now I don't know how the hell people even use Google Maps. Live Local has way more features, is far more useable, and provides better local search results. Live's shopping and image search imo are also better than Google's though that is slightly more subjective. The interface for those two is definitely nicer than what Google offers though I think the results are more or less the same.
Well, we already it. After all, XML is just Lisp with the parentheses replaced by brackets (okay, not entirely true, but close).
[Page 3]
To read the article on "Choose Your Own Adventure Books" turn to page 117.
[Page 117]
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
You have died.
The End
Maybe.
Actually, Clippy was out of university research rather than MSR if I recall correctly. As for research showing up in products, it's often hard to say "exactly." But to name a few off the top of my head for sure: - MSN Search - a lot of search technology, IR stuff - SQL Server - database research - Microsoft SNL (speech and natural language) - a lot of the phone system products and such as well as their speech-to-text, text-to-speech products come out of their research in these areas Overall, in all of their products, there is actually a lot of research stuff that goes into it because MS actually spends R&D (both R and D) dollars on software correctness/verification. If you look under the literature for bug finding, software verification, or any of the above categories I mentioned (information retrieval, speech, natural language, databases) you will most definitely see papers published by MSR and you can be confident that a lot of that stuff does hit the product.
Microsoft is one of the biggest companies focused on 'R' - they have two major research labs: Microsoft Research (in Redmond) and a lab in Beijing. It's all Ph.D.'s and they are most definitely focused on research. While sometimes they have a product in mind, a lot of the stuff is pure research, very academic. They publish papers and often, their papers don't lead to products.
netvibes? I'm surprised more people aren't talking about live.com. For years I've been starting on a blank page when opening my browser, but now I'm considering starting it at live.com. It beats the hell out of Google's ig and is better than netvibes (which is also better than Google)
Ah, but to really really foul things up requires a Slashdot editor.
I'd recommend taking a look at Lucene as well.
That's because as is typical of /., the article summary is cut and paste directly from the article itself. The paragraph in question occurs on page 3 of the article if you want to skip ahead to it.