Microsoft Behind Google Complaints To EC 346
justice4all writes to share that some of the recent complaints to the European Commission about Google have apparently been coming from Microsoft. "A lawyer for Microsoft confirmed that the software giant told the US Department of Justice and the European Commission how Google’s business practices may be harming publishers, advertisers and competition in search and online advertising. [...] 'Google’s algorithms learn less common search terms better than others because many more people are conducting searches on these terms on Google. These and other network effects make it hard for competing search engines to catch up. Microsoft’s well-received Bing search engine is addressing this challenge by offering innovations in areas that are less dependent on volume. But Bing needs to gain volume too, in order to increase the relevance of search results for less common search terms.'"
"Well Recieved" my foot! (Score:5, Interesting)
I staunchly refuse to use Bing.
Here is why:
1) Shamelessly promoted to the point of paying people off to make it a default choice (EG, Verizon & Blackberry ordeal, many others.)
2) Created expressly to "Stop Google", rather than to fill some otherwise useful purpose. If it had been created to fill some role that google failed to deliver at, then I would consider it useful.
3) Stinks heavily of yet another embrace and extend tactic, "now with 100% More FUD!"
In short, Microsoft's Bing is only on the radar because microsoft has dropped shitpiles of money into promotion. It really doesn't matter to me if it actually works or not; the reasons for it's creation had nothing to do with innovation, and everything to do with disruptive "I want my share too!"
As such, I refuse to use Bing, and I would think many other people would get tired of being bombarded with BING! every time they look for something on a M$ partnered site. I know I grew VERY tired of it when I was helping a friend of mine look for real estate lately; MS had partnered with the realestate brokerage to forbid closeup viewing of the property with highres sat images from Bing's mapping feature, without first greasing the pockets of the Realtor. I have experienced other forms of "Evil" from MS Bing, and am now firmly against ever supporting it.
Re:For once the system works (Score:3, Interesting)
Once Microsoft's competitors opened the "anti-trust" Pandora's box on the software industry, it's gloves-off all around.
The entire whole volume of anti-trust "law" is arbitrary and capricious. It is a giant favor and influence peddling racket, with no basis in objective reality, and no underlying premise.
It takes a while to condition the public to allow a much-loved company to be "ready" for politicians to dig in and do some carving. Google is getting there.
This is for the realists (Score:2, Interesting)
Google: Successful Capitalist American Company
Microsoft: Successful Capitalist American Company
Re:Microsoft is late to the party. (Score:2, Interesting)
only its money sustains it.
and where do you think it gets that money from? so long as a company has enough paying customers to keep turning a profit, it cannot be considered obsolete.
Re:Makes sense really (Score:1, Interesting)
Repeating a lie doesn't make it the truth. BTW how's that astroturf career working out for ya?
Re:What? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What? (Score:1, Interesting)
Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, Linux, SuSE, RedHat, Debian, Solaris, AIX, BIND, DHCPD, LikeWise, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Ruby, Python, Perl, bash, posix, Integrated Development Environmnet, C programming, and anything else that Microsoft makes a (competing) product for.
I trust Microsoft's search engine to only to return results that are relevant to their products. I trust Google's product to find the right answers, regardless of whether or not they make a competing (and often free to use) product.
Re:Makes sense really (Score:2, Interesting)
Monopolies are always bad, though sometimes unavoidable (at reasonable cost). That said, I'd rather trust Google in the catbird seat than MS. MS has been shown to be an extremely abusive monopolist. (Not the worst, by any means, but still extremely abusive.) Google hasn't shown that. It may no longer live up to the slogan "Do no evil", but doing evil isn't it's reason for existing. With MS I'm not always sure that's true.
So if you're arguing that search engine is a "natural monopoly" (You might be right.), then I'd definitely prefer Google over MS. I'd also prefer a lot of restrictions on how they could use their monopoly, emphasizing that they couldn't favor some users over others. (I have no evidence that they are doing so at the time, but monopolies inherently lead to corrupt behavior.)
Yes, yes ... using product improves it (Score:1, Interesting)
Because as we all know, the immense popularity of Microsoft's software means Microsoft gets huge amounts of critically useful feedback that helps them to make their products so much better over time, and that's unfair. For example, it took user feedback from several versions of Office before they introduced Clippy as a solution, and several more versions of additional user feedback before they removed it. Same for such things as WGA in Windows, which was introduced in later versions to address user complaints about receiving counterfeit versions of Windows. That kind of incremental improvement due to feedback from users was completely unfair to the competitors because they were unable to implement similar features.
Haw.
Re:Google make me nervous (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows open?!?!?
I'm sorry, we must live in a different universe. Even Apple was more open than MSWindows. (I mean, here, Apple ][, ][+, LC, LC+, etc. up through System 7.5. I can't speak of after that.) MS not only failed to properly document their system for developers, they lied about what they did. (Possibly it was just LOTS and LOTS of mistakes.)
If you compare MSWind to what came before, then it exhibits a truly paranoid degree of closed-ness. Also if you compare it to either BSD or Linux, or even the proprietary Unixes. Apple, however, has become nearly as closed as MS...but I've stopped developing for them, so I don't know if they lie about their specs. Actually, I don't know if MS still lies about it's specs, as I stopped developing for them, too. Now I develop on Linux, and if it runs on MS, great. If not, sorry, I don't have a system to test it on. (It's often Java, Python, or Ruby, so it *SHOULD* run everywhere. This, of course, doesn't mean it does.) (If I ran into trouble with a BSD implementation, I'd install a BSD partition or VM. Hasn't happened.)
N.B.: My development environments are nominally cross-platform. But you know what that means. Things usually work. If I can get it to work under Wine, that's as much MSWind support as I'll handle. (I read EULAs.)
Re:Google make me nervous (Score:3, Interesting)
It's worth mentioning, however, that Google unfucked the situation in less than 48 hours. Complete with deployment to everyone's Gmail account.
When Microsoft fucks you, you stay fucked until it's more profitable to pull out.
Re:Makes sense really (Score:5, Interesting)
MS fixed the problem, but not before being called out on it. If it were intentional, that would be expected but probably some serious antitrust concerns would be valid given the default search preferences on IE/windows, which dominates the market, and is branching out into other devices. It's getting better, proving that it can improve even if it doesn't have the huge number of searches to data-mine. Further, is anything stopping MS from looking at Google's search trend pages? Last, there was an article not too long ago about how Google tries to contextualize searches. Publically available, and easily implemented in a way which wouldn't infringe on their patents.
The alternative is even worse - that the biased results were unintentional. Sure it's been fixed, but if your initial launch has results skewed in favor of the owning company and it wasn't on purpose, that's a gigantic pile of fail rolled up in a little humiliation pastry and covered in skank sauce.
gp's point was that MS is complaining about having fewer searches to data-mine, but can't even get the existing search results "fair and balanced". In other words, they need to improve before whining. GGP of course was indicating that Google's method of competition is to produce fair results, while Microsoft's method would be to bias everything towards Windows. Of course we got here by GGGP suggesting that Google's high marketshare will always continue to guarantee high market share because they have more search data for research.
The whole point of all of this is that if Microsoft has good technology and good results, people will be exposed to it through vendor lock-in, one way or another, and eventually discover for themselves that it either sucks or doesn't suck. Microsoft's best strategy is to focus on getting good results with the data they do have, not whine about a better algorithm getting more hits. Of course it will have more market share, Google's ranking algorithm is extremely mature, apparently unbiased, and constantly improving.
Of course, the irony of the king of lock-in complaining about being locked out when they have Bing as default on Windows as well as increasing numbers of phones is delicious like a very expensive dessert. That the initial roll-out of Bing was so fundamentally flawed the GP post still remembers how skewed the results were and feels the need to comment on it should be a clear sign that Bing has an uphill battle, even if they got a live streaming copy of every Google search, legally and with Google's blessing.
Or in other words: Red herring.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/169750/bing_search_reveals_promicrosoft_results.html [pcworld.com]
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1496589/can-trust-bing [theinquirer.net]
Verizon require Blackberry default search be Bing, and not changeable. You can visit google.com of course, but that requires extra typing.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/verizon-forcing-microsoft-bing-search-blackberry-users-100 [infoworld.com]
Illuminating comments thread
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1252533&cid=28175167 [slashdot.org]