Ok. What do you think of this thing?
Bing: The easiest way to Google since Yahoo!
Bing Rapidly Overtakes Yahoo Search (For Now)
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Ok. What do you think of this thing?
Bing: The easiest way to Google since Yahoo!
Bing Rapidly Overtakes Yahoo Search (For Now)
The easiest way to... google? Heh. It's a pity that isn't the actual Microsoft-produced ad, because that would embroil MS in a massive trademark lawsuit. I'm sure Google Inc would love nothing better than to catch MS with their legal pants down.
As to the actual material: I think it'll have its fad, and then settle down to a quiet ticking-over. The downside to all these new search engines popping up is that they all need to crawl the web separately. Twice as many crawlers means web servers have to deal with twice as much non-viewed traffic... with a lot of little sites, non-viewed exceeds viewed by a massive ratio (with the G&S Society's web site, it was two to one, and there's heaps of lower-traffic sites than that).
The real question of survival, for most of these startups, is whether or not it makes money. In this instance however, that might not really even matter - Microsoft will gladly fund it out of other revenue, as an assault on Google. It's another salvo in a major war, in which somehow an OS company fights head to head against a web search company... and personally, I think it's a war that benefits consumers more than it hurts us. We get options (Google Docs/Spreadsheets vs MS Office; Chrome vs IE; etc etc etc), and that's a good thing, for the most part. Microsoft stops Google from becoming too cocky, and Google stops Microsoft from being quite everywhere. :)
Ads like that one that uses 'google' as a verb 5000 times might be part of a MSFT effort to break google's trademark.
If the verb 'google' becomes ubiquitous as a verb for searching the web, they could lose trademark protection. That would suck for them.
A single ad (or campaign) that uses 'google' as a generic verb is a viable target for a trademark suit. 5000 people all using 'google' as a generic verb once each would be what breaks the trademark. Google Inc are definitely fighting hard against genericalization, so I have no doubt that, should MS violate trademark, they'd be pretty quick into the courts.Quote:
Originally posted by Aristotle
Ads like that one that uses 'google' as a verb 5000 times might be part of a MSFT effort to break google's trademark.
If the verb 'google' becomes ubiquitous as a verb for searching the web, they could lose trademark protection. That would suck for them.
That's not MSFT's ad, right? Its a parody? And even if it was MSFT's ad, they might be able to get away with it simply because of how 'google' is being used as a verb (but again, I think that's a joke ad, not a real ad).
Trademark dilution happens gradually. It is the death of a thousand cuts. That ad is just one small twig that eventually helps break the camel's back.
Lets not forget I'm the lawyer here, not you. :)
Yes, which is why I started with "It's a pity that". Microsoft's probably going to die a slow death of internal bleeding (of money), and anything that pours money out of them will hurry that along.Quote:
Originally posted by Aristotle
That's not MSFT's ad, right? Its a parody? And even if it was MSFT's ad, they might be able to get away with it simply because of how 'google' is being used as a verb (but again, I think that's a joke ad, not a real ad).
Point. And point. :) But Google IS jealously guarding its trademark, and hey... I enjoy seeing battles between them and Microsoft. And read the conclusion at the bottom of this article, dated 2003, and you'll see a remarkable prediction.Quote:
Trademark dilution happens gradually. It is the death of a thousand cuts. That ad is just one small twig that eventually helps break the camel's back.
Lets not forget I'm the lawyer here, not you. :)
I don't see MSFT going anywhere bad anytime soon.
The XBOX360 has been a giant success, and the ability to stream Netflix movies over the XBOX360 is just adding even more value (and profits) to the XBOX division.
Windows 7 looks promising. I am sure they'll have a new Office version soon.
MSFT still makes pretty good hardware/accessories - like their mice.
Sure, Live, MSN, and search are crap. But maybe Bing will be useful. It has already surged ahead of Yahoo.
And MSFT is even getting savvy in how they fight google. Check this out:
http://www.reuters.com/article/bigMo...07083220090629
Business is war.Quote:
At a San Francisco press conference earlier this month, Google's lobbyist, Dana Wagner, was pacing the audience through his talking points when just about every reporter in the room started getting emails on their smartphones. The mail was from Microsoft and they were supplying well thought out counterpoints to the presentation. Suddenly, the reporters' questions got a lot more intelligent and skeptical than Wagner might have thought possible.
I'm not confident of Bing's long-term success (they're going to be pretty hard-pressed to beat Google, and the only alternative is to go into a different submarket like Wolfram did). As to the other things - I'm sure they will have a new Office, and they will get revenue from Win 7, and the XBOX is definitely going to keep on bringing in money. But the rise of open source software has eroded their OS, browser, *and* office marketshares, and eventually, they're going to shoot themselves in the foot trying to recover that. There's a limit to how long you can maintain the monopoly (the more you tighten your grip, Microsoft, the more star systems will slip through your fingers), and several governments have figured out that it's extremely profitable to notify MS that you're planning to shift to Linux.Quote:
Originally posted by Aristotle
I don't see MSFT going anywhere bad anytime soon.
The XBOX360 has been a giant success, and the ability to stream Netflix movies over the XBOX360 is just adding even more value (and profits) to the XBOX division.
Windows 7 looks promising. I am sure they'll have a new Office version soon.
MSFT still makes pretty good hardware/accessories - like their mice.
Sure, Live, MSN, and search are crap. But maybe Bing will be useful. It has already surged ahead of Yahoo.
It's not going to happen any time soon, but eventually, Microsoft will either reinvent itself (as IBM did, when their monopoly shattered) or die. For the sake of the consumer, I hope it is the former. Unless the Linux community gets Windows emulation to the point where you could actually install Linux on someone's system and they be able to run all their favorite programs without trouble, we can't afford - from a business and end-user perspective - to lose Microsoft. Love 'em or hate 'em, we need 'em.
Microsoft is in for change I think, but I doubt we'll really see it fail overall. I've considered Windows, Internet Explorer, and Office to be shit for years. The open source equivalents are better and free. However, the Xbox 360 is a great machine, and as Aristotle noted, their mice are really good.
I'll take a look at Bing. I can't see a reason to switch from Google, but maybe they'll surprise me. Windows 7 doesn't seem to be as bad as Vista, so maybe I'll give it a shot too. I'm even less likely to make the shift from Linux back to Windows though.
On a side note, I recently inherited a 750gb hard drive, so I basically started installing every game I own onto it, via Wine in Linux. I'm about 15 games in, so far only one of them wouldn't install, and another needed a setting change to install. That's a pretty good ratio as far as Windows emulation goes, I'd say.
On the desktop side, open source software is not cutting into Windows market share at all.
On the server, there are inroads, but even those are not huge.
They never really made any money on the browser anyway, so that's a bit of a non issue.
I would love to see open source alternatives to Office succeed, but that's still pretty tepid. And that is the area where MSFT is most vulnerable.
In most areas, MSFT continues to dominate their market and make heaps of money. And the XBOX shows they are still able to expand into NEW markets.
So I really don't see any reason to think MSFT 10 years from now won't be as big or bigger than they are now.