Now that the fuss over Bing’s launch is already over (that didn’t last long, did it?), what is the future for it? According to this article’s source, Bing had a 11.1% share of the US Search market. Microsoft apparently haven’t hit above 10% since 2007, so that could be seen as quite a positive thing. But Google seems pretty confident this is just a blip on the radar and they are unconcerned, and that could potentially be true.
I’m no expert by any means, but it will be interesting to see how this pans out.
Whats more, if Microsoft really love the Bing name, will they start replacing all the Windows Live products after replacing Live Search? Will we start using Bing Messenger, Bing Hotmail and so on? Will they do a last minute re-brand of Windows 7 to be Windows Bing? That would be quite funny…
This bears slight resemblance to the already widely publicised anti-trust/monopolising cases against Microsoft for bundling their own software with their OS, without offering the alternatives (read here (Windows Media Player) and here (Internet Explorer)). Admittedly, the competition for browsers and media player software is much higher than instant messaging software, but it’s slightly related.
Many Windows users will have already seen this install software, which is now downloaded every time you want to update a program, such as Windows Live Messenger. The program itself isn’t my concern, rather the automatic ticking of nearly every other Windows Live software on the list. I only wanted to update Windows Live Messenger, yet the program had automatically selected Mail, Photo Gallery, Toolbar, Writer, Family Safety, Office Outlook Add-on and Office Live Add-on for additional installation. That is an extra 128mb – a paltry amount, by most accounts, yet still an amount I have no need for.
To rub salt into the wound, post installation the default option is to change your search engine as well as fix your homepage. Rumours on the Internet are that if you do not remove the “Set my homepage” link, then the program installs an additional program that forces your homepage to stay the same; apparently (although I have not had first hand evidence) to the extent of not letting the user change their homepage for themselves. The idea behind it is to stop spy ware changing the homepage, yet this seems counter-intuitive to not allow users to change their homepage at all… As I said though, I cannot confirm the legitimacy of this rumour, so it may be speculative.
To summarise, Microsoft shouldn’t have these additional pieces of software automatically selected for installation – a less savvy user (family members come to mind…) might not look at this list and add these unnecessary pieces of software to their system.
It looks like we’ve taken another step towards never leaving our houses. It’s nothing new I know, but Luke reminded me yesterday of it’s existance – Microsoft’s rather impressive stab at mapping software à la Google Maps.
Instead of Google’s angle of just taking pictures of everything, Microsoft are going down the less intrusive route of just making 3D models of all the buildings. When I last saw this last, it was much less impressive, but looking at it today, you could almost say it’s better than Google. Although having said that, Google Earth has this same 3D view, but in a standalone app.
My opinion though, is that they both have their merits – Google Street View is pretty cool, and so is this 3D view… I suppose it depends what you want it for.
Regardless, with competition from these, and probably other mapping software, combined with online shopping, online chat, video gaming, home offices and a whole host of other software, it’s looking more and more likeley that I’ll never have to get off my bum ever again.
Cloud Computing is a buzz word that’s been chucked around a lot on the Web 2.0 world recently, and with the announcement yesterday of Windows Azure, a cloud-based operating system developed by Microsoft, I thought I’d give myself more of an insight as to what this means.
It isn’t really a new concept, just like AJAX was never a new concept, it’s just when people realise things can be used in a certain way, it gets popular real fast. Basically, the concept of clouds is providing an abstraction layer, and normally a physical seperation between several nodes, for example cloud storage (Amazon SimpleDB, Google BigTable), cloud infrastructure (Amazon EC2) and cloud services (Google Checkout). In fact, you’ve probably already used cloud computing without even realising it… Google Maps and Google Docs are a couple of examples. Google, as you might have guessed, are pushing forward with the cloud computing bits quite a lot, and the only other real competitor in my eyes is Amazon, especially their hugely popular EC2 and S3 services.
It’s a pretty cool concept though – instead of having a laptop with 10GHz processors and 1TB of RAM and all that, we’ll all be using Eee PC with just Firefox running, most likely connected to Google. The concept of that forces buying hardware into the providers hands – the companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. and all we do is use the services. I’ve not really gone into too much detail about what it is, but one of the advantages of this whole thing is that you don’t have to worry about data storage, and you can access your stuff anywhere you want.
The big thing holding UK back from diving headfirst into this cloud computing stuff is the fact that most residential UK internet connections suck. We’re still using ADSL and cable broadband for christs sake. And unreliable at that. Despite Virgin Media having a 35% market share, and BT Broadband having 40%, I still hear endless complaints about them. At the end of the day, even 24meg just doesn’t cut it (although in reality, I’ve rarely seen someone actually get anywhere near the potential throughput of a 24meg connection, due to contention ratios and all that). We need Fibre to the Home, and we need it with low contention ratio – we need Gigabit internet (or maybe 40 gigabit anyone?). The problem with that is that no-one wants to foot the £28.8 billion bill. I digress, that’s a different story…
