OurView: The Opinion Blog

August 2008 - Posts

• Live Search – Olympics coverage good but shows Microsoft still isn’t a global search engine

  There has been several debates raging today about the Olympics coverage from various media outlets thus far, and in particular regarding NBC in the US, who Microsoft have partnered with (see NBC doesn’t feature Bolt, has Silverlight take-up really done that well). While its still to early to judge the success of Silverlight, I’ve been focusing so far on following the progress of Live Search. At the start of the Olympics much was made about the tailoring of Live Search for this global event, and it was some of the comments on our original post that got me thinking about the strategies Microsoft is employing with Search. Localisation is a topic we’ve mentioned consistently over the past few years and this was a key opportunity for Live Search to step-up and show itself as a global search engine. Alas it didn’t happen. This isn’t just a case of a few missing homepage images though, nearly all of the Olympic Instant Answers (medal tables, athlete profiles, stats on athlete searches from XRank, etc) are entirely US only. Note that some markets do have limited Olympics features, GB has medal tables for instance. For comparisons, Google appears to be running its features across all markets. Today’s USA homepage image features Michael Phelps, which was up almost immediately after his win last night, showing just how relevant Live Search can be. (Good job Venkat!) One other region has featured Olympics imagery so far, and that has been China, with the Bird’s Nest stadium showing throughout the competition. The fact that homepage imagery is showing in another market reinforces that this is not down to technological limitations, but is a business decision. Who makes the decision to focus on 300million users, when you have another 6.4 billion in markets around the world? Search, guesstimated value at $1billion for 1% of search queries, is an extremely lucrative market.  If the decision to deploy key features is down to insufficient resources, namely people to do the translations and update the content, then you have to question intent and desire to succeed. On a side note, Steve Clayton discusses assumptions with regards to product launch and localisation, based on some recent IM stats. Broadband penetration isn’t an issue in this regards, Search is a platform independent, device independent, connection independent, browser independent service. No excuses here I’m afraid. Incidentally, the Michael Phelps adorned page has a link to the latest Olympics news coverage on Live Search. Here’s the page while I was writing my post. In my mind this shows just how far Live Search still has to go for relevance. (Note: I use both Live Search and Google in day to day use.) Posted Aug 17 2008, 07:08 PM by Chris with 10 comment(s) Filed under: Corporate Strategy, Silverlight, Search

• Steven Sinofsky starts blogging on Windows 7

  Just thought I’d do a little promotion for one of our old friends, Steven Sinofsky, who is now blogging with John DeVaan over at Engineering Windows 7 (or e7 for short). There’s a welcome post up already, which leaves you in no doubt as to their intentions for the blog. “We strongly believe that success for Windows 7 includes an open and honest, and two-way, discussion about how we balance all of these interests and deliver software on the scale of Windows. We promise and will deliver such a dialog with this blog.” Steven you already started off by setting expectations too high, and inevitably you will now disappoint. Maybe someone could be open, honest and two-way about Ultimate Extras though while you’re at it – you know, that small little thing we all paid $100 for. “In leading up to this blog we have seen a lot of discussion in blogs about what Microsoft might be trying to accomplish by maintaining a little bit more control over the communication around Windows 7 (some might say that this is a significant understatement).” …and Windows Live too. See Long Zheng. I’d go out on a limb here and say this was approved disclosure. “Our intent is to post “regularly”. We’ll watch the comments and we will definitely participate both in comments and potentially in follow-up posts as required.” Why the quotemarks? Ohh, that’s right, its going to be a press-release style, information posted when approved by PR type of blog. Maybe just move the blog to MS Presspass to make it easier for those mainstream journalists to find and quote? “We will make sure that members of the Windows 7 development team represent themselves as such as well.” So the Disclosure Director is now tasked with beating employees into commenting on the blog. Oh fun times in Redmond for the next 2 years! Community vehicle, no. PR vehicle, most likely. PR is good, just don’t pretend this blog is something it is not going to be. Full credit goes to the real community efforts. PS: Steven, if you want some more stickers just let us know. Maybe throw us a link in your sidebar? Posted Aug 14 2008, 10:42 PM by Chris with 7 comment(s) Filed under: Corporate Strategy, Windows 7

• First Apple, then Amazon and now Google. Can anybody do cloud services well?

  With all the fuss in recent weeks about Apple’s dismal failure with MobileMe, in particular around providing a stable and reliable service, its interesting to see that today Google is having issues also. With Gmail down, Twitter is on fire as bloggers start complaining about their lack of email access. It’s also worth remembering that 3 weeks ago Amazon experienced some significant downtime in its S3 storage service, used by a number of Web 2.0 companies for image hosting. Without wishing to tempt fate, the stalwarts of internet communications, AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft have all done exceptionally well in recent years with their IM and email services. Looking back to the late 1990’s there were issues seemingly ever month or two, but now with their vast datacenters and experience, all three of the above have services that are much more reliable. However they too still experience issues occasionally, Hotmail had one earlier this year, which makes me wonder how quickly the uptake of services like Live Mesh will be. With people now wanting to move their business applications and data storage to the internet, 100% availability is the only uptime that users and companies will accept. If you can’t search your email for that critical file when you need it, you’re potentially another dissatisfied customer.  The question is whether anybody can deliver this, and if not, how much downtime will users tolerate - is three nines really attainable? Is it really affordable? While the issue of data security is always going to be the biggest priority, internet companies are going to need to do much better in order to match the desktop experience. By the looks of things, cloud services still have a way to go yet. Posted Aug 12 2008, 12:37 AM by Chris with 3 comment(s)

• Kumo - A new name for Live Search?

  Mary Jo Foley got a great tip last week concerning the possible Live Search rebrand we’ve talked about since this time last year. While the Codename Rome update still went ahead last September, the possible name change was put on hold. Fast forward one year and Microsoft has failed to acquire Yahoo, and with Live Search Cashback just starting to take off its too early to call it a successful initiative. Does Microsoft want to speed things up, and would a rebrand necessarily achieve this? Kip looked at the branding of Microsoft search several times already, and what’s clear is that while marketing improvements are needed, the product itself still has a way to go, especially in terms of relevance. While Mary Jo talks about three possible names and her research on them, one possible jumped out straight away to me: Kumo. Apparently meaning either “cloud” or “spider” in Japanese, it wasn’t the literal meaning that got my attention. The giveaway was that the registrar for Kumo.com is CSC Corporate Domains, a company Microsoft has been using increasingly over the past year to pre-register its upcoming product names. Remember that whois I linked in our first post on Windows Live FrameIt? Yes you guessed it, CSC Corporate Domains. If you spend 20minutes researching further, you’ll see that nearly all major top level domains (TLDs) have been registered or changed owners since March 2008, including .fr, .es, .se, and .co.jp. All of them to anonymous registrants hiding behind the registrars. The caveat I’ll insert here is that CSC Corporate Domains is used by many corporations to acquire domain names, so it could be any company for any product. However the speed and thoroughness of the acquisitions suggests its not just a small Web 2.0 startup that is looking to launch a product in this space. So if its not Microsoft that is relaunching Live Search as Kumo, then somebody else sure wants to keep their upcoming product secret. But that would be one hell of a coincidence. Posted Aug 05 2008, 09:27 PM by Chris with 11 comment(s) Filed under: Corporate Strategy, Opinion, Search, Live Search, Kumo