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They have difficulty enough dealing with present search, let alone prancing around in the clouds.

Frankly, I'd like a good service /now/, not down the line. Reminds me of Vista - 'all the the present features of a Mac, delivered in the future!'

Edited 2007-03-06 23:28

Not only that: when I read "Microsoft Researchers", I can only image some guys from Microsoft looking at software made by competitors and saying to each other: "How can we make this look like we invented it?".

It's like they say, Brewmastre: You only get one chance to learn from your competition.

It's like they say, Brewmastre: You only get one chance to learn from your competition.

Yeah, but apparently they never put a limit on how many competitors you can learn from

You only get one chance to learn from your competition.

Not anymore. On the Web, being first to market with something useful is everything. There's too many businesses vying for the extremely limited attention of the mass market. The time between market creation and market saturation is often as short as a few months. You don't get any second chances. Being first and executing the first time around is the name of the game, which are not Microsoft's strong suits.

Amazon was the first to get e-commerce right, eBay was the first to get online auctions right, Google was the first to get search right, Apple was the first to get online music distribution right, and YouTube was the first to get embedded video right. Nobody has been able to challenge them, and plenty have tried.

Google understands this better than anyone. Was GooTube a deal made in heaven? No. But once YouTube reached critical mass, Google's embedded video plans became completely useless. The only way in is to buy the hot property. The truth is that is would be cheaper for Microsoft to buy Google outright than to throw money into a black hole.

Be first, go big, or go home. And don't cry about it, because nobody cares.

Google was the first to get search *right*?

I distinctly remember using InfoSeek and AltaVista before Google w/o any problems. Google just did it a little bit better.

It's probably most accurate to say that Google was the first to fix search after the former heavyweights started to suck. Even Yahoo had search "done right" at one point, then everything went downhill after they ditched the grey background/lack-of-background colour and went crazy over the whole "personalized portalized are the wave of TEH FUTURE!!!1" silliness.

I used AltaVista before I discovered Google. When I first experienced Google, it was like night and day. Unobtrusive, lightning quick, and impressively accurate. No comparison. It changed the way I used the web. Before Google, I had no reason to be connected to the Internet for more than 10 hours per month. Google made the web so useful that it was worth buying unlimited access.

Normally, Microsoft's competition is pretty lame, being run in a very non-technical "make profit this quarter or die" fashion by ex-salesmen (i.e. IBM -- the PC doesn't matter). It is going to be hard for them to crush real "technical" competition like Google.

The pathetic technical background of Bill Gates is chronicled on Wikipedia, now we find why certain "failures" appeared in DOS/Windows: donkey.bas:written by Bill Gates, Bob/Clippy, from Mrs. Bill Gates (Melinda French-Gates). We see Bill Gate's first experience with a teletype computer was to exploit bugs in the OS to steal mainframe time. Nothing ever changes.

"donkey.bas:written by Bill Gates"

Thats the best you can do when naming a failure in DOS?
A small game Gates wrote as a proof-of-concept late one night in 1981? Seriously?
You really need to do better than that.

On the plus side, it lowers the standards of debate sufficiently that it's now apropos to begin making jokes about the teenaged Steve Jobs' adventures in phone phreaking.

I mean, would YOU buy a computer from a man who was once arrested while trying to stuff electronic devices down his pants in a phone booth?

And since we're going down that lane of low standards and past sins; would you buy a computer from this man?
http://www.mugshots.org/misc/bill-gates.html

"The word this comment thread desperately needs"

Lol! That was the first thing that came to mind when reading this. (the word 'Google')

Edited 2007-03-07 07:46

Yes but it looks identical do Google, if you cannot crush your competition then imitate them that's Microsoft's motto.

in IT/Computer field everyone copys everyone. good ideas propergate. I am ssure the vaunted google did some copying. its called evolution.

So thats what it's called now is it, evolution?. I bet I can come up with a page layout for a search engine that looks nothing like Google.

The line between evolution and copying seem to be more blurred than ever these days.

I bet I can come up with a page layout for a search engine that looks nothing like Google.

You mean Yahoo?

Any link on this? What are you talking about?

He's talking about a speech made at the Association of American Publishers yesterday where Tom Rubin, MS Associate General Counsel for Copyright, Trademark and Trade Secrets, talked about respecting IP rights while bringing new content to the web.

One of the things he talked about was the copyright issues surrounding Google's approach to publishing content for their Book Search service vs. MS' and some other companies.

Transcript:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/trubin/03-05-07AmericanPubl...

The NYT (and likely others) characterized it as MS attacking Google:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/06/business/media/06speech.html?_r=1...

First, this is Microsoft Research, not Microsoft.
http://research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/overview/default.aspx
MSR always focuses on the future and is not usually involved in the development or maintenance of current products. They conduct research, often in concert with universities and other research organizations. They frequently publish their findings, and not all of their research is even related to markets in which MS participates. They also license their technologies to other entities. TechFest is an annual event that is open to the public, which is why MSR is talking about projects that may or may not make it into Microsoft's products.

Second, not everyone at MS works on the same products. Different teams handle different products, and for larger products, there are also different teams handling initial development for new releases vs., maintenance of currently released products vs. planning the release of future products.

Last, Microsoft isn't the only company planning new products while releasing current products. It's common among companies in many industries, and planning for the next version is often started before the current version ships. And this planning has no effect on the level of development or support given to current products.

If you have issues with current products you think need fixing, it'd be a lot more productive to file a bug report at http://connect.microsoft.com or another support mechanism than it is making vague references in this forum that MS will probably never see.

Edited 2007-03-07 11:23

It's called find in Windows.

net view | find /i "pc_name"

Windows find is a poor substitute for grep. For searching your PC, grep is a miracle tool. For example, I recently helped a programmer find which library some obscure function was in with grep (on GNU/Linux):

grep -l obscure_function /usr/lib/*.so

Windows users can get a usable version at http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/.

> For searching your PC, grep is a miracle tool.

Strange though, that your miracle tool was still working on a search query after one minute of work, when Spotlight finished the same query in 6 seconds.

one minute?!? Six seconds is a fairly long time for a grep search, in my experience. I've never heard of it taking a whole minute to search for anything. It sounds like there may be a disk problem involved.

"Strange though, that your miracle tool was still working on a search query after one minute of work, when Spotlight finished the same query in 6 seconds."

What query did you formulate?

If grep is used to search multiple files, the amount of time needed could even be bigger if there are more and / or bigger files. For example, if you combine find and grep:

% grep "foo" `find /home -name *bar[0-9] -type f`

The find tool allows to extends the search parameters, such as file size or modification date.

For file patterns, locate is faster than find, of couse. It uses a database instead of the files actually present.

Both grep and find are O(n), locate is much faster, maybe O(log n).

They're aimed at different groups of users and different types of search tasks - with the most obvious difference being that one is a focused GUI desktop content search tool, while the other is a rather general-purpose command line text parsing tool.

I would also suspect that Spotlight doesn't come anywhere near the flexibility of grep, simply by virtue of it being a command line tool (since grep results can be piped or redirected just like any other text output). Even if there are command line tools to perform Spotlight searches, it still doesn't have grep's ubiquity. That's especially important with scripts - one can fairly safely write a shell script under the assumption that grep will be present on any machine where the script is run, regardless of the underlying OS (as others have pointed it, even Windows can run it).

"For searching your PC, grep is a miracle tool."

Only if you have a rough idea of where to look.
'grep -ri "some string" /' isn't that much fun.

Edited 2007-03-08 02:42

Heh, funny *and* true - that deserves a mod up.

If it weren't for the damn thing being IE's default search page, I truly can't imagine anyone using the MSN search engine.

OT: On a related note, I remember finding it quite odd when browser makers started doing that back in the 90s - "What the eff? I takes an entire 10 seconds to change a browser's home page." Looking back now, though, it seems as if that serves as a pretty reliable marker for the point at which commercial software began its steep decline (in terms of customer service and quality of product). I think that it marks a fundamental shift in attitude, when the higher-ups at AOL, Microsoft, Netscape, realized "Hey, 90% of our user base are technically incapable of changing their browser home page. So if we just set our webpage as the default and cover it with banner ads, we can just sit around twiddling our thumbs as the $$$ rolls in!"

Knot found?