Perhaps a bit OT, but... The post seemed to be riddled with formatting and grammar errors. This rubbed my old-school English sensibilities at first, but then I began to enjoy its rough feel.
After all, it's a post about how people who worked tirelessly to bring a product to market were shipping things while the rest of Microsoft slept. The story very clearly describes a dichotomy in Microsoft's culture between process/rules/superficial quality on the one hand and relentlessly shortening the ship/fix cycle on the other.
This post is not just about shortened ship/fix cycles, it is itself an example of a shortened write/fix cycle.
When that struck me, the style of post suddenly "clicked:" It was as if I was reading an email that was furiously blasted out to Posterous while the author's compiler worked, and thereafter there was no time for extensive editing and proofing by a circle of reviewers. What mattered was to get the idea out and to start the conversation, editing and polish would follow later.
I'm highly tolerant of spelling/grammar errors, normally. Who cares about "it's" vs. "its" in this context, right? But in this case, I needed to re-read every sentence. Even after re-reading it a few times, I had to guess the author's intended meaning. That is just a failure to communicate.
I'm the author of this post and by no means I expected this to be on the top of HN today. It was a surprise. I din't do any good editing on this, since it was my personal blog and I had sent to Michael Arrington, who wanted to edit/publish it. For some reason, he backed out at the last moment and it din't make it to TC. Welcome to the world of citizen journalism.
Sorry about the typos/errors. I'm looking into this now :)
English is his second language and the grammar mistakes weren't a big deal for me.Some of the over-the-top language (especially in his recruiting post yesterday :) was.
imo the post essentially says that the people he liked at Bing were all great. He then goes to suggest that the departure of all these great people (presumably including him) is equivalent to the death of Bing. He also chooses to indict unnamed "professional managers" while praising several other individuals (and managers) by name
Prasanna says that he is surprised to see his post at the "top of HN today". However, imo there is nothing surprising about a Microsoft-bashing post being on the front page:).
It's one of those very, very scarce texts where mild swearing adds something. 99 out of 100 times, it's just deteriorating the post quality and signs of bad writership.
Indeed. Saying "Michael fucking Burrows" made me look him up (as intended, I guess :) )
"Michael Burrows (born circa 1963) is widely known as the creator of the Burrows/Wheeler transform. He also was, with Louis Monier, one of the two main creators of AltaVista" (which I guess was the point!). He ironically now works to Google according to Wikipedia.
din't is easily a sticky key or a fast-typing error. It happens to any of us and doesn't necessarily say that the person has a separate first language.
Furthermore, even though it's good form to read over a message you're sending and remove the typoes, grammar-os and other such issues, it doesn't always happen :)
> What mattered was to get the idea out and to start the conversation, editing and polish would follow later.
On the other hand, careless writing shows that the author places little value on his thoughts, for if he thought them important he would spend a little more time on their delivery, ensuring the contents don't get destroyed in the process.
You infer from careless writing that the author places little value on his thoughts, because if you were writing them and you thought them important, you would spend a little more time on their delivery.
Indeed that is true, but it is also true that if you are writing things for other people to read, then what value those other people put on your delivery is more important than what value you put on your delivery.
If you are writing only for yourself, then things like grammar and spelling are less important because, presumably, you know what you meant. However, if you want other people to value what you write, grammar and spelling become very important.
First, because poor grammar and spelling sabotage your meaning and delivery. There were several sentences in the article where I had to stop and think "err... what is he trying to say?" It is entirely likely I misinterpreted the meaning of some of these sentences. The fact that the author understood and valued those sentences is of utterly no help to me.
Second, there are people who believe confusing and ungrammatical writing are symptoms of confused and unknowledgeable writers. I understand you may not agree with this but, again, if you are writing for other people then it is the other person's impressions you must consider, not your own.
Defending ungrammatical writing by challenging a reader's inferences and thoughts is not convincing because, if you are writing for other readers, it is precisely those inferences and thoughts you should be addressing.
I don't see how the grammatical errors could have arose simply from writing a rough first draft of a blog post. It seems like the writer has little experience in the way of English grammar.
The OP seems to attribute the "failure" of bing to common problems associated with Microsoft (in specific) and large companies (in general). With a specific point that it all started wonderfully, then got corporatized. I'm happy believing that this was the main problem.
But...as an end user i don't think Bing was/is ever as as close to Google as the OP seems to think.
it's really disgusting to see people quietly being blacklisted.
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1 point by kami8844 0 minutes ago | link [dead]
I had to do some web scraping for an application that I recently wrote and only when my app's performance started to rely on the results provided by the various search engines out there, I started to fully appreciate how good Google is. It's just no comparison; in edge cases and unconventional searches (where it really matters) Google completely creams the competition.
While Bing came closest to providing search results as accurate as Googles it still wasn't at any comparable level, so all in all I agree with your point.
Thanks for pointing that out, as others have written below, I'm a new user and while the system here looks pretty similiar to the one at Reddit, the type of comment that is appreciated here seems vastly different. I was kind of surprised to instantly receive 3 downvotes for my first comment that just expressed my happiness to have found this community, and while it was pretty void of content, the rules expressly state that empty comments can be OK if they are positive.
I agree that the system is quite a bit too trigger-happy. Being shadowbanned is a pretty shitty spot to be in and I don't think 9 downvotes over 4 comments qualify for such harsh punishment.
>I don't think 9 downvotes over 4 comments qualify for such harsh punishment
Personally I'd say that depends. If you have a positive comment history then no you sholdn't be banned for a small run of comments that the community finds unhelpful to the conversation.
If all of your first comments are downvoted then I suggest you make a new account and wait until you have something positive to say.
Note that positive doesn't mean affirming groupthink, or karma whoring (which is hard here but looks possible) but adding to the conversation. An opposing opinion well expressed often won't win a lot of upvotes but it usually gets more ups than downs.
Part of the problem is that downvoting is used to express disagreement. We have this discussion often on HN (perhaps too often): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
Note: the following unexpectedly turned into a bit of a rant, with a dose of whining thrown in:
Many of us "old-timers" think that downvoting without giving a reason is mostly bad form (the exception is for a rude or obnoxious comment). I've personally noticed an increase in this behavior.
I believe that doing so decreases the user experience. I've had plenty of disagreements over the years and have almost always learned something from them (even if it just required me to do a bit of soul-searching). Posts would be painstakingly composed (one of the big complaints we had was that the post-page timed out while we were composing- so we had to result in using a separate editor to compose, then click "reply" and copy-and-paste.
But now-- why bother? I've been around a while. I'm on my second (third?) career. Not a hacker extraordinaire by any means, but I'm well educated technically and have maintained my involvement with a broad array of interests (I like to learn new things). I've seen some things, and I'm willing to share- and even be challenged in my own conclusions about them.
But when I make a post that the "average HN-er" (age 25, so I hear) may not think is very smart and I immediately get downvoted with no reason given, it sends a signal that HN has changed in a very dramatic way.
I might not have as much experience as you, but if I've only learnt one thing from being active on Reddit is that giving your personal karma-score any meaning is just a major headache and best be avoided. But the development you are talking about can also be witnessed there. For example in /r/programming, there used to be things such as posts with 91 comment karma and _0_ downvotes. This stuff doesn't exist anymore, the community has grown, become a lot less homogenous and more 'nay-sayers' have introduced themselves.
The above is of course just an example that is indicitative of what I'm talking about. In my opinion, it is best to simply accept downvotes without explanation as background noise. They happen and there's not much you can do about it.
I know what you're talking about but it doesn't apply to comments. The only thing that automatically adds up and downvotes to comments is what they call 'fuzzy comment karma' which is to prevent bots from figuring out too quickly that they have been shadow-banned, since to them it looks like they are getting 2 downvotes here and 3 upvotes over there.
The system has been active longer than the post was old and it's just and example, if you read through comment threads back then and now, you will notice the difference without having to rely on karmic metrics.
>[kami] "For example in /r/programming, there used to be things such as posts with 91 comment karma and _0_ downvotes. This stuff doesn't exist anymore, the community has grown, become a lot less homogenous and more 'nay-sayers' have introduced themselves."
WRT Reddit what I've heard on the site is that they have an obfuscation system that adds downvotes and hides the current voting position. It would be impossible thus to see that a story had 91 upvotes and no downs as apparent downvotes are automatically added. It's supposed to be part of the system to prevent people from gaming karma scores.
I wonder whether it's an automatic consequence of having substantial negative karma.
(I'm ambivalent about the stealth-blacklisting thing. It's probably the right thing to do with genuinely abusive users. It might be the right thing with people genuinely incapable of contributing much. But I've seen too many cases where someone's comments are all being auto-deaded -- invisibly to them, AIUI -- with no obvious reason why they should deserve it.)
Right, the system is far too trigger happy. Instead of showing a newcomer what kind of comments are valued here and possibly gaining a valuable new contributor, the system severely punishes beginner mistakes. We can't reasonably expect that a new user knows what kind of comments are valued because on the rest of the internet such comments are perfectly acceptable. Perhaps something like Quora does would help: before you can use the site you have to do a quiz on what kind of comments are good comments.
"Perhaps something like Quora does would help: before you can use the site you have to do a quiz on what kind of comments are good comments."
Really? Sorry, but that sounds like a terrible idea. HN is already insular enough, we don't need to start demanding newcomers pass a test before we let them comment.
Let's see. There are two groups of people: people who would have passed the test and people who would not have. The people who would not have would most likely be hellbanned after their first 3 comments (and of course people are allowed to take the test as many times as they want). So you lose nothing. By using a test fewer legitimate people get hellbanned. In other words, this is only going to improve the situation. I'm not talking about a difficult test here: just a couple of questions like:
Comment: LOL
Is this an acceptable comment?
Right now people are used to that being an acceptable comment on the rest of the internet. These people currently get hellbanned on HN because other people downvote these comments. It's not a test for testing whether the people are acceptable on HN, it's method of teaching customs and a test for whether people have read the guidelines.
I'm not opposed to it because I think it wouldn't keep bad posters off, I'm opposed to it because it would keep most posters off. It's arrogant and self-righteous. "Sorry, you have to prove you're good enough to post on our holy news aggregator."
It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth and it's the last thing this community needs.
So you're saying that the current method of silencing those people without even notifying them is preferred? They keep posting and most times their posts add value. Yet these posts are invisible to users without the showdead option on.
The karma metric is pretty transparent. You learn very quickly which comments are and are not appreciated. Dropping a friendly comment to someone you see who hasn't caught on yet works, as well.
What do you think the likes of a Matt Cutts would do if they were trying to sign up for HN and the site forced them to say whether "LOL" was an appropriate comment before allowing them to post? It's insulting and arrogant and will drive away the kind of people we want posting here. All that for a "problem" that is invisible the vast majority of the time.
Stopping famous people from signing up is a good point.
On the other hand the system is clearly broken now.
> The karma metric is pretty transparent. You learn very quickly which comments are and are not appreciated. Dropping a friendly comment to someone you see who hasn't caught on yet works, as well.
This is not the case as it is currently implemented. If one of your first comments gets downvoted you get hellbanned. There is no chance to learn from your mistakes. Dropping a friendly comment doesn't work either because you cannot respond to hellbanned people. Do you have showdead on? Try it and you'll probably see that about half of the hellbanned people still posting invisible comments are legitimate. For example you will find 3 of those people commenting on this post, two of them having no idea that nobody is reading their comments.
This guy has been banned for 2 downvoted comments and has been posting legitimate but invisible comments for over a year. You can clearly see the learning effects: his first couple of comments are not HN quality. Unfortunately by the time he got accustomed to HN he had been silenced.
I think we can fix hellbanning without too much tinkering. Perhaps a simple notice if someone's first posts are downvoted advising them to check the submissions and comments guidelines, perhaps with some common first time mistakes and their more preferable counterparts added. That should help the noobs while still allowing trolls to be banned.
Just for counterpoint: it would be easy for new users to figure out what a good post is by reading and paying attention to the scores they get. One gets a sense for what makes one a -4, another a mere zero, or some other a +47.
Looks like he's a new user that got mostly downvotes on his early comments.
In isolation, I can't entirely disagree the downvotes, but it seems to me that the system ought to be more tolerant of people that screw up their first couple posts as long as they were honest contributions (as opposed to spam).
Perhaps the ban should be triggered a lot more heavily on flags than downvotes up to a certain number of posts.
A karma based ban that makes some sense for people that are consistently bad. But it seems to me that the current ban code doesn't give newcomers enough chance to change based on the feedback they've been given. New users don't have a buffer to fall back on if they make one or two bad posts, and ought to be given more leeway. As long as people are flagging correctly, that should take care of obvious trolls or spam.
Speaking qualitatively, I disagree. I actually use them interchangeably. When I'm using IE (testing features), if I have to search, I just search from the location bar, which defaults to Bing.
I feel like the results are essentially the same and I never recall having trouble finding what I'm looking for in Bing. Though I suppose one huge omission is the date filter. I use that a lot on Google and certainly miss it sometimes on Bing.
Most importantly, Google was essentially stagnant for years until Bing came along. Since then they've really upped their game. They cloned Bing image search. They took the context summary in Bing that I loved from the beginning and one-upped it. And I've seen more natural answers in Google to match what Bing set to do from day one.
I use and support Bing and you should too. What Bing did to Google is like what Firefox did to IE. It reminded them that they should be innovating still!
I don't know how good Bing was, but Google put a lot of work into modernizing it's website after the launch of Bing so maybe they did see it as a threat.
I had to do some web scraping for an application that I recently wrote and only when my app's performance started to rely on the results provided by the various search engines out there, I started to fully appreciate how good Google is. It's just no comparison; in edge cases, misspelled and unconventional searches (where it really matters) Google completely creams the competition.
While Bing came closest to providing search results as accurate as Googles it still wasn't at any comparable level, so all in all I agree with your point.
My level of frustration Redmond has reached epic levels. My company spends thousands of dollars a week managing advertising campaigns on Adcenter. They have an API which has been nothing but issues, but given the breadth of our advertising base it's absolutely necessary that we use it.
Today we have entered day number FIVE of an outage in which the API (at least one critical portion of it) simply errors out no matter what call you make. So for five days we've been unable to pause campaigns, change bid prices, or otherwise do anything to effectively manage our campaigns.
It's nuts. This is the second major outage in the last couple of weeks. The part that KILLS me is that nobody in Redmond seems to give a damn. They announced that they had a problem two days after I brought it to their attention. They are apparently working on some sort of fix that may or may not be pushed sometime in the last three days.
Meanwhile we are absolutely blowing through cash because of the things that we can't adjust. We're tens of thousands of keywords spread out over more than a thousand campaigns. We don't employ anybody to manage these by hand...
That would be of little comfort I'd imagine if you had a lot of custom stuff running through the API. At least they opened the thing up recently to add customers, that's a step in the right direction. (Although that could also be the cause of instability, they did have years to prepare for it though.)
I think that's one of the objectives of this article; provide that alternate perspective.
I thought that Bing was the true turning point as well, but I never gave Live Search a fair chance then, and I don't think many others did either.
To me, it looks like the author saw Bing/Live Search as something truly transformational within Microsoft. Public perception was that Live was a failure. But if I understand currently, the team was easily beating internal estimates extremely fast . For one reason or another there was a team reorganization that coincided with the PowerSet acquisition and the Bing rebrand. While there was a jump in market share, the foundation of the Bing team was taken out from under them and replaced with MS status quo.
Bing's death isn't a result of their success or failure as a search engine. Bing's death refers to the loss of something that could have made a difference in Microsoft, internally. The death of a team that could have done something truly great , (EDIT: as said by Cicero, when they were at their peak).
At that time I was paying a lot of attention to search results, from two perspectives: 1) I had some slightly unusual / difficult searches I performed regularly, and 2) examining search terms that brought people to some sites I ran.
For case 1, Google simply wiped the floor with Live. Note that Live had the most relevant results in their index, but they'd be way down on the 5th page, 10th page, wherever.
For case 2, the majority of people coming to my sites from Live were coming there with search terms indicating that they did not want my site. For example, I had content for Phoenix, AZ and some polls. My site stayed within the top 5 on Live for search terms like "phoenix polling locations." Of course every site gets some of this from any search engine, but with Live is was problematic.
My perception was that Live was a failure, and I think my reasons were valid.
You have an outsider perspective, while the article was written from an insider's perspective. It appears that the technology team was at its peak when it changed from Live to Bing, and has declined since then. The success of Bing has been due to marketing, but without a sound technical team behind it, it's going to die.
I've just recently spoken with my friends, and I know for a fact that it atleast takes a month from point of checkin to review/test/stage/production. If you disagree, I think what you are talking about, is probably an exception and not the norm.
Being secretive about release cycles is pointless stealth.
"The report of my death was an exaggeration." -- Mark Twain
I was having a look at Terabyte drives in Best Buy yesterday, and while wondering how well a model might work with Linux, I realized, now the display computers actually have internet capability, I should be able to look it up right there in the store! So, I wander over to a convenient laptop, kick it out of screensaver mode, start up the browser, and plug in the product name. Only after I hit the search button did I notice WHAT service I was using. Added bonus: Google was NOT an option.
I'll believe that Bing is dead when it isn't the default search engine in the default browser on the default operating system at the default computer store.
Interesting perspectives. I was there in 2006-2007 when they made the decision to throw resources at the problem and challenge Google head-on in algorithmic search. The strategy at the time was to become #2 in a duopoly by investing at a level that Yahoo! couldn't compete with, and focus on the most valuable searches (travel, shopping, etc.), and leverage Microsoft Research a lot more.
From an abstract business perspective it's worked remarkably well. But if so many motivated and talented people are leaving, then there's something fundamentally flawed. And there were a lot of other much-less-expensive approaches they could have taken instead (or in addition, if they wanted to shoot for the moon) that would have also created a lot more opportunities for growth and excitement for younger engineers in particular. Ah well.
Strange. To me, as an outsider, it looks like Bing has just started to get good enough to be considered as a threat to Google. Of course, they have a long long way to go. But it appears as a rapidly emerging product rather than a dying product.
The biggest problem that comes in the way is the condescending attitude of the "grown ups". It is very important for the "management" to realize that they are actually only facilitating what is "happening" and they should let the system handle itself and get out of the way than get into and disturb the existing norm.
One of the most serious problems with modern "management" is that the incentives are all wrong. Imagine that I hire a programmer and pay him by the line of code. This idea has been so thoroughly debunked that it is nearly impossible to write out the consequences without sounding cliché. Yet it happens all the time: Companies promote "Architects" who are evaluated by the weight of their "architecture." The result is stultifying and demoralizing. The architect does not work to facilitate the programmer's work, he works to produce evidence of his contribution in the form of frameworks, standards, and software process.
So, how are most managers evaluated? By the amount of "managing" they do, as measured by the amount of process they impose on their team. Evaluating a manager by the amount of managing they do is exactly the same thing as evaluating a programmer by the amount of code they write. And it produces results like you describe, where the manager works to produce evidence of their management in the form of processes and decisions from the top down, rather than facilitating the work actually being done.
In a simplistic world, the answer would be to change the incentives and the behaviour would change itself. But as they say, "correlation does not equal causation." The incentives have to change, but so do the people. Results-oriented managers don't work in those kind of environments to begin with, and after a year or two in such a place they will already have left. You need to change the incentives and the culture and the people all together.
Middle managers are rewarded for making budget and meeting release dates. Seems good, right?
So they agitate for (wait for it) maximum budget and minimum feature set. So that success is assured and their metric is optimized.
Unfortunately those things are exactly contrary to company goals. Why does this happen?
{opinion} Middle managers are too remote from either customers (financial goals) or top management (company goals). They're in the middle, right? With layers between them and either end.
And when you try to optimize any process with too many degrees of freedom, you have too many variables and get to choose which ones to look at. So middle managers look at their own career and ignore the rest.
My suggestion: line up all middle managers in the parking lot (important), stand at the end of the line, and put one bullet through all of them (optimizes cost in bullets).
If my company Ever has middle managers, its time to call it quits.
I think it's not the presence of middle managers; but how they are evaluated and incentivized. I don't envy their jobs; the upper managers have entire teams with clear tasks; the engineers on the other side have stuff to do; the middle managers are, well, caught in the middle. So they try to make themselves relevant by injecting themselves into various processes; by blocking things to make sure that everyone knows that they are present; by taking credit wherever possible.
So eventually it's the fault of the upper management, if they can't come up with the right incentive scheme to keep things moving smoothly.
I hate middle-managers too with a passion; but having seen them operate, I can't blame them for doing what they do. They're just playing the game by the rules. Blame the one who made up the rules.
Peter Drucker has claimed the lack of Middle Managers to be responsible for the early declines of Ford and Edison Electric Company. Their presence itself isn't a failure, it's their role and management.
It is funny that you mention architects because, my job title where I work is "Architect".
I totally agree with you in that it is the people that is the most important of all things. Tools are just tools and processes are just processes, it is the people when given right tools and shown right processes that make all the difference.
You're right. Ideally, people should be rewarded for the actual results they get, not for the amount of work they appear to have put in it.
A guy who would on the surface do very little yet gets excellent results, should be appreciated more than somebody who appears to do a lot of work yet has no end results to brag about.
Bing was extremely lavish in compensation, making offers to the best hackers for $90K/year when the adjacent teams were making $75K/year offers.
This is what really stood out to me. I'm in tech management these days...I pay my good developers close to $90K, and I'm no Google or Microsoft. What's wrong with this picture? Bing was created what...four years ago? Is this really a realistic salary for the best hackers?
For all the people saying X search engine is better, here's a tool to compare Google and Bing (and Yahoo) results without bias. It simply shows you three columns of results, you click on the one with the best results, and it reveals which ones came from which search engines.
Hmmm, it's giving me the wrong results... it shows the results I voted from are from "Bing", but when I went to Google it showed me those results, and Bing's results where the ones marked "Yahoo".
I've seen this site before and frankly I think it's rather irrelevant. Recent innovations (past years) in search are mostly spelling corrections/related topics suggestions, visual presentation of aggregated results (how many images, results from suggestions) and stuff like that. The pure ranking order delivered on a fixed search is more and more useless, the imo important part is how the search engine guides you until you've found the correct search query that delivers what you're actually looking for.
I don't know that Bing has "failed" yet, but I highly doubt it'll be anything other than one amongst many in the pack in 5 years.
Microsoft has always been good at the pivotal turnaround. Recognizing when a key moment was on the wind, mustering together a tremendous effort, making a good number of smart decisions and putting out a solid anchor product that (re)cements their position in the industry and reinvigorates the brand in doing so. Windows 95 and Windows 7 are perfect examples. IE4 (yes really), Bing, and Windows Phone 7 are also good examples. One of the big problems with Microsoft is that its organization and its culture are extremely tied to the traditional 3-ish year ship cycle. A hugely successful diving catch every other ship cycle or so is rapidly becoming less and less feasible as a means to hang on to or acquire a market. Microsoft does not seem to get the web at a fundamental level, it doesn't seem to have the capacity to release software at a pace of yearly, monthly, or continuously.
And that will ultimately be the undoing of Bing and the Windows Phone. The only way MS knows how to crank out releases faster is the deathmarch, and that is a certain route to doom.
Worse yet, since Gates left MS has no real technical or managerial leadership, it's bureaucracy all the way up and down. This has been affecting the culture at Microsoft little by little, also partly coupled to the stock price having plateaued. More and more talented devs are finding that MS lacks the excitement and the reward of cutting edge development, so they are moving elsewhere. Also, without that talent around fewer good projects are pushed forward, fewer projects succeed, people become less satisfied with their jobs, etc. (think about the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" only translate the bad stuff, on a corporate level, to hundreds and then thousands of George Bailey's going away). This makes the environment that much less rewarding for everyone else who remains, so yet more people leave. And slowly but surely the creep of a more rigid and bureaucratic corporate culture and organization fills in the gaps left by the people who had the most clout in the company, causing yet more and more talent to evaporate away.
It's a self-reinforcing cycle that will lead to the rapid diminution of the company and its prospects over time and the examples the article provides of the process as it happened at Bing have played out throughout the company. Nobody young with high prospects seriously considers Microsoft as a destination anymore, and increasingly the older devs are either retiring on their massive earnings from the glory days or they're just looking for somewhere else to be that's a better use of their time and talent.
MS continues to make a crap-ton of money from its core products, but it will be institutionally ham-strung in responding to the threats that will steal away that revenue (such as mobile-heritage operating systems). Because those threats will grow at a rate MS is incapable of competing with.
>"I don't know that Bing has "failed" yet, but I highly doubt it'll be anything other than one amongst many in the pack in 5 years."
For Microsoft, having a full featured reliable non-core product with measurable market share is a success because it allows Microsoft to offer vertical integration without the specter of anti-trust allegations - imagine the howling in DC and Europe if Bing controlled 70% of search (never mind the valley).
Bing's robustness helps Microsoft sell software and services, while it's modest market share keeps infrastructure costs lower and Microsoft's core revenue stream coming from areas other than search reduces the pressure to game search algorithms towards their advertisers in order to increase revenue in the way that Google does.
What the article shows is not that Microsoft is inept, but rather that they are able to create an internal unit with many elements of a startup, scale that unit massively, and then transition it into a solid corporate structure capable of surviving over the long term - in other words, the article shows that Microsoft was not only able to successfully foster internal entrepreneurship in order to quickly move into a new market and capture meaningful market share in the face of a mammoth, entrenched, and powerful rival which dominated the market, but also to consolidate that position swiftly before their rival could respond in a significant way.
I'm afraid you're moving the goal posts a bit. When I was at Microsoft I saw a lot of presentations about how the advertising industry was much bigger than the software industry, and how MS needed to tap into that growth opportunity in a big way. I saw very few presentations about how a modest search market share would keep infrastructure costs lower.
I believe you are mis-characterizing my position somewhat - I stated that lower infrastructure costs are a benefit of smaller scale but I did not state that they were the sole measure of success.
While I don't doubt that powerpoints about quick easy money from advertising were legion in Redmond, it doesn't change my belief that Bing has been a significant success for Microsoft despite the money being neither quick nor easy. The notion of measuring the success of the Bing team against the whole of Google is silly. Bing's success should be measured solely by the business benefits it provides to Microsoft.
"I stated that lower infrastructure costs are a benefit of smaller scale"
I find this statement confusing. Perhaps in terms of absolute numbers, infrastructure costs are less at smaller scale, but as a percentage of revenue, larger scale usually shows increased infrastructure leverage, until you get to Microsoft/Google/Facebook size, and start designing your own Servers, Power Supplies, Storage, etc...
It's completely reasonable to compare companies against each other to determine their success - particularly when being the leader gives you network-effect benefits.
Measuring costs with actual dollars rather than percentage signs is often the best way to judge the bottom line. Yes, relative infrastructure cost tend to go down at a larger scale - assuming that revenues increase in proportion to the infrastructure added, which may not necessarily be the case with Bing and advertising.
It is also important to acknowledge the opportunity costs for Microsoft that scaling Bing might entail, e.g. is infrastructure more profitably used for cloud services or search? Does an advertising revenue model interfere with the necessary trust which underpins Microsoft's business relationships with enterprise customers?
I am not saying it is unreasonable to compare Microsoft with Google at the corporate level - but using Bing and Google Search as the primary criterion for such a comparison is a category mistake.
This was not the goal. Recall that they tried to buy Yahoo and merge into a solid competitor agains Google. I'm sure there are many smart people still left at MS, but not as many as you make it sound.
Not necessarily, "Bing : Microsoft" is not analogous to "Google Search : Google." Bing just needs to fill a small gap in Microsoft's total product portfolio whereas Google Search is the crown jewels for Google. In other words, Bing can be a cost center for Microsoft and still contribute to the company's bottom line by contributing to increased revenues in other areas, but if Google Search starts losing money Google is in real trouble.
So long a Bing provides meaningful statistical data regarding internet search,keeps Google from data mining searches performed in Redmond, and serves as a productive R&D platform it is successful for Microsoft because they do not need to generate significant revenue from advertising to be profitable.
Of course more market share is good. But Microsoft is not purely interested in growing share with Bing; non-differentiation with Google is a good thing in and of itself. The less differentiated Microsoft is from Google, the greater perception of their platform having feature parity with Google. That way consumers are not forced to choose based on features, just ecosystem.
This is a the reason that Microsoft is a fast copier of market leaders, so that everything consumers could want, on paper, is housed within their roof (and Google's). It seems counterintuitive that less differentiation would be useful, but I think it's what Microsoft is going for.
Microsoft used to be able to "embrace and extend" in order to extinguish the competitor. With Bing it seems they can only "embrace", by which I mean copying and trying to decrease differentiation. But look at the trend. In the future, when/if Google search incorporates social feedback effects (ala +1), Bing won't even have the user-base to be able to copy the competitor, let alone extend and extinguish.
One look at my website statistics tells me Bing is already as good as dead.
I'm not completely convinced that Bing lacks the user base to compete with Google. There are diminishing returns in user base volume after some point, and Bing has around 100mm US users[1]. I think any of us would be pleased as punch with that volume and it's not clear it's not enough to do something-social-with-search.
Microsoft doesn't either. I have no doubt Google's search will be superseded by an even more competent product. I just doubt Microsoft is able to deliver such thing. To go against Google you either need infinitely deep pockets or a technology so disruptive that it effectively neutralizes the size advantage Google has or turns into a disadvantage. Microsoft will go head-on with Google until it acknowledges failure, rename the product and try again. Much like the Black Knight on Monty Python's Holy Grail, they just won't quit. And, when they do, they'll claim victory.
> Microsoft has always been good at the pivotal turnaround. Recognizing when a key moment was on the wind, mustering together a tremendous effort
I remember it happening once - they went against Netscape. They could outspend Netscape 100 to one and bundle/force bundle their competitor with their OS and that's why they could crush Netscape. They can't outspend Google two to one.
Note: I remember how they took the air out of Netware with Windows for Workgroups. They recognized there was a market below the one Novell had nearly monopolized and took it before Novell could launch a competitor (something hard because it came - again - bundled with the client) and provided a smooth upgrade path to Windows NT. But that's not the same as with IE vs. NS - they had Lan Manager for eons before they realized they had a niche they could expand. And, like with IE, they could rely on bundling with their OS. I doubt Microsoft can put Google in that position.
>"I have no doubt Google's search will be superseded by an even more competent product"
I don't think it will be a matter of technical competence, but of economic competence. The achilles heal of Google's model is it's dependence on advertising and the incentive such dependence creates to skew search results and engage in "creepy" behavior with respect to individual privacy. The way in which Google monetizes search is increasingly susceptible to significant social and legal backlash. the structure of Microsoft's revenue stream is such that Bing could be adapted to the radical changes such a backlash would entail more easily than Google's data mining based revenue stream would allow Google Search to be adapted.
I've never met someone outside of a very narrow subset of the technical scene who even cares about the implications of Google's tracking and monetization strategy. I suppose it's a risk, but an "achilles heel"? I doubt it.
It is a nice place for a niche player (like DDG) to come in and fill tho.
Not sure this is relevant progress but 18 march bing for "HG download" gave no mercurial results (hg was assumed to be a mistyping of HD), by 24 march it was giving all mercurial results. I twittered about both.
That is at least anecdotal evidence that things are progressing in some way or another.
That's not necessarily a change in the codebase, that could be the system learning from associations in queries and results it gets over time (something I know Google does and has for years, at least).
If it would be easy, then perhaps you should do it. Such a conclusion would have a nice amount of academic value.
I imagine there are a large number of small and/or untraded businesses with dishonest or illegal practices. Perhaps data would even show that larger market cap indicates corruption is less likely, depending on your measurement for corruption?
A buddy and I were drinking months back, and for whatever reason (most likely several beers was the reason) he misinterpreted the Bing and Facebook arrangement that was made for "Facebook is buying Bing."
Completely un-Microsoft, I can't see it happening but if it did.. Damn that could make things interesting.
Bing is interesting, it's a great attempt. The problem is Microsoft, so long as they're running it and setting the "standard" for it, it's going to be a failure. It's not going to knock Google off their perch. It's just not. And anything less than that will be a failure. Cut that team and product free, hand it over to like a facebook? IBM went through some similar stuff, MS should be spinning stuff out, if their current phone effort fails again to live up to their hype, they should just cut that group free too, let them go and be successful. that stuff creates new industries which in turn create new opportunities for everybody, including MS. Let Bing or Bing + FB cultivate an army of guys that want to get rich and can control their own destiny, the output will be far more interesting
I am not sure about the death of Bing, Bing has momentum and they should take it forward and not lose ground. Competition is important to bring the best out of technology.
No. Remember the article talked about poaching students right out of college. $90k a year isn't much for an experienced developer, however right out of college (and at the time) that was 10-20k more than they could expect joining another company.
Bing is not really providing anything more than google's service. It only shows "big company's" routine of trying to drive others out of business. Death for Bing.
I disagree. I remembered Bing's decision engine commercials when looking for a plane ticket. Turns out that Bing is way better for flights than Google is, by far. Just try typing New York City to Los Angeles into both search engines. Bing finds what you are after and Google does not.
I prefer how Google handles that search query. If you're looking for a flight does entering 'fly' after your two destinations really hurt that much? 'to' is -more often than not - a pretty meaningless keyword, and I'm pretty sure most people don't want half of what's above the fold to be taken up by flight information if all they enter is a very general 'New York City to Los Angeles'.
It's not just the flight specific widget bing has, but the fact is consolidates several sites worth of data into a single interface. On Google you don't get a unified view of data. The ticket vendor is not important to me. It's only the flight cost and number of stopovers that matter, which google does not help with.
After all, it's a post about how people who worked tirelessly to bring a product to market were shipping things while the rest of Microsoft slept. The story very clearly describes a dichotomy in Microsoft's culture between process/rules/superficial quality on the one hand and relentlessly shortening the ship/fix cycle on the other.
This post is not just about shortened ship/fix cycles, it is itself an example of a shortened write/fix cycle.
When that struck me, the style of post suddenly "clicked:" It was as if I was reading an email that was furiously blasted out to Posterous while the author's compiler worked, and thereafter there was no time for extensive editing and proofing by a circle of reviewers. What mattered was to get the idea out and to start the conversation, editing and polish would follow later.
Great stuff!