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Bing + Facebook = Google++?
Ad Age Digital reports today that Microsoft's Bing search engine and Facebook are teaming up on yet another deal designed to dampen Google's massive lead in search.
Coming soon: your FB friends' recommendations and comments alongside the usual search results.
This latest salvo in what promises to be a long and interesting battle of the big search engines may prove interesting but I see its value as being pretty limited. Other than searches for things like a restaurant or a book or a movie -- which comprise for me a least a very tiny percentage of my searches -- friends' thoughts are likely to be pretty unhelpful or non-existent. I'd find it far more interesting, e.g., if my LinkedIn network was tied into search results because a huge portion of my searches are business-related.
But integration of social with the more established use of the Web is going to be a huge story in coming years and this is just the beginning of the story.
MS Word on Mac Fundamentally Broken
One of my main clients has insisted that we use Microsoft Word for project document collaboration rather than my strongly preferred Google Docs. But of course the client is always right, so I'm adapting.
But tonight I spent an hour longer than I needed to spend editing a document that required substantial modifications. Word on Mac OS X just seems to lose its mind from time to time. I lost substantial work three different times when all of the menus in Word -- dropdowns and ribbon-based -- just started showing blank contents. All other apps running at the time were fine. I'd try Command-S to save a document and get an absolutely blank dialog box in the middle of the screen. It was just plain weird.
On other occasions, text entry slowed to an absolute crawl. I'd be typing 5-10 words ahead of what was displaying on the screen while the disk thrashed.
I've been avoiding using MS Office products as much as possible for the past several years and now I understand why. They just don't work reliably.
Key Investor-Analyst: Ballmer Has to Go
David Einhorn, president of well-known investment firm Greenlight has told an audience at an investment show that Microsoft's board should give CEO Steve Ballmer the old heave-ho. That would be a great move, though it comes a couple of years late.
Einhorn accused Ballmer of having a "Charlie Brown" style of management and said that the guy who replaced legendary founder Bill Gates is "stuck in the past. He’s allowed competitors to beat Microsoft in huge areas, including search, mobile-communications software, tablet computing and social networking. Even worse, his response to these failures has been to pour tremendous resources into efforts to develop his way out of these holes.”
Under Ballmer's leadership, "Microsoft’s online services business, which includes the Bing search engine, lost more than $700 million last quarter."
Einhorn accused Ballmer of having a "Charlie Brown" style of management and said that the guy who replaced legendary founder Bill Gates is "stuck in the past. He’s allowed competitors to beat Microsoft in huge areas, including search, mobile-communications software, tablet computing and social networking. Even worse, his response to these failures has been to pour tremendous resources into efforts to develop his way out of these holes.”
Under Ballmer's leadership, "Microsoft’s online services business, which includes the Bing search engine, lost more than $700 million last quarter."
