Has anyone you know ever used Bing?
Microsoft has been in early discussions with the News Corporation, the media conglomerate controlled by Rupert Murdoch, about a pact to pay the News Corporation to remove links to its news content from Google’s search engine and display them exclusively on Bing, from Microsoft, according to a person briefed on the matter who spoke anonymously because of the confidential negotiations.
[….]Microsoft could actually secure a public relations victory by coming to the rescue of battered media companies, Mr. Barnicle said. “The ability to have some sort of objective news media is pretty important,” he said. “Maybe Microsoft is in a position to fund that.”
Objective news media. Heh indeedy.
I wonder if Microsoft talked to the Moonies too.
Update. I guess what I most of all don’t get is that Murdoch Media is aimed at the Flomax/Matlock crowd (I don’t mean all older people here — you know what I mean). They’re probably all still using AOL keyword searches anyway. Right?
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
Has anyone you know ever used Bing?
Only the time or two I was using IE and typed in a wrong web address. IE automatically goes to Bing at that point. It’s annoying. Otherwise, no.
MTmofo
There are Bing cherries and there was Bing Crosby. I am unaware of any other Bing worthy of my time, attention or affection.
asiangrrlMN
Seriously, no, seriously?
cgp
The maps feature is pretty slick, in particular the birds eye view. Generally nicer than the street view which is really, really blurry.
Gaucho Politico
im not going to bing to search for content from fox news which i would also have to pay for. This seems like a very bad idea for rupert but a great benefit for those of good journalism.
tom
According to Jeff Jarvis
Alien-Radio
Microsoft and News corp both have a similar business model, Capture a market and seek rent from it. I think this is probably more of a “the enemy of my enemy” thing, unless Microsoft really wants to get into content delivery.
Given that MSN collapsed as an AOL like service shortly after windows 95 I can’t see them wanting to go back there.
These are both organisation notorious for being far behind the curve that either buy their way into a market, or consider randomly flinging stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks as innovation.
EdTheRed
Oh man, I can’t believe Microsoft is willing to actually *pay* Fox News to pull their links from Google…thereby making my life that much more pleasant.
Any chance we could get Microsoft to create an alternative to memeorandum and take all the Politico links with it?
Alabama Blue Dot
Bing Sux. Honestly, I ran it side by side with Google and it came up with identical responses. Nothing new, except annoying banners that you can’t get rid of. Even Yahoo is better.
Zam
It’s set as the default search on the comps at the university I attend. Other than that I haven’t even looked at it.
It’s funny to hear someone state that it’s gonna take a huge corporations involvement to restore the faith people have in an unbiased media. Seriously these people are fucking morons.
freelancer (itouch)
Outside of the 360, everything M$ is really fucking evil.
Brian J
Unless there’s some way that a lot of Fox-supporting people would somehow switch to Bing as a primary search engine so that it could gain market share and make enough to give News Corp a cut, I don’t see what the point of this is. (Would Microsoft give Murdoch some percentage of revenue, by the way? If not, what is this beyond some attempt to fuck Google?) It seems like such a move would hurt Murdoch a lot more than it would hurt Google.
In some ways, though, I bet a lot of people in the media world are secretly happy that Murdoch is trying to see what happens if he tries to implement certain solutions. If he’s successfully able to charge for papers besides The Wall Street Journal, it’ll be a lot easier for other papers to try.
MikeJ
If you ran a newspaper that Bing indexed, would you not ask them why they pay some people and not you? Google can say, “we don’t pay.” MS can’t.
MacsenMifune
So I’d get crappy news from a crappy search engine.
cleek
fuck Bing.
fuck it in the ear.
Comrade Kevin
@freelancer (itouch): Microsoft make a pretty good mouse, but there’s no way in hell I’d buy a 360.
Brachiator
Oh, it would be fun to watch Murdoch commit intellectual property suicide. Here’s a little tidbit from an analysis of the deal.
These morans are not understanding the wisdom of a line from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan:
To try to hide all online newspapers behind intellectual firewalls, or even to demand that users pay for a subscription to news services individually is insane. They need to come up with the modern equivalent of an ASCAP or BMI royalty model.
Bing and the NewsCorp content will become the equivalent of an InterTubes black hole. The content will just disappear and everyone else will just navigate around it.
Martin
I’ve used Bing. It’s okay. It needs to be better than okay to get me to dump Google, though.
And this plan will never work. robots.txt works on the honor system. If a sector of the internet decides to wholesale break the honor code for one member in favor of another, nobody should expect the honor system to continue working at all.
Unless the news outfits are willing to go fully behind the paywall, Google is going to find them if Bing can find them.
Mako
I once had… whoa Alta vista is still a search engine!
KS in MA
Hadn’t gotten around to trying Bing. Good, that’s one less thing I have to get around to trying.
That bumps bungee jumping up to the top of my list. In alphabetical order, of course.
The Other Steve
Yeah, that’s my gut reaction too.
I’ve actually used bing, and in some ways it’s better then google in other ways it is not.
The search is about the same, although I’ve generally found google easier to narrow my results with. Bing does have better images, videos and maps though.
El Cid
Yeah. My feelings would be so fucking hurt if Google News no longer listed News Corporation
politburo bulletinsnews stories.It would be such a vaccum left in Google News that I might actually notice such a loss on a rare occasion.
El Cid
vacuum
Mako
Probably not, could you repeat it really slowly and maybe louder and possibly in english?
Todd Ogin
On a somewhat related note to your flomax comment, today a rep for usps was on washington journal talking about ways to change the postal service to increase revenue and improve customer satisfaction. At one point the individual kept on talking about how you could avoid going to the post office and buy stamps online, not realizing if individuals who wanted stamps went online to get them they’d probably never bothering going to the post office again. My guess is that those who are still buying stamps at the post office (and not the bank or costco or any other random place that also sells them) will keep buying them there.
El Cid
I’ve been reading that as “Flowbee“.
DougL
Google news indexing, now new and improved with 100% less WSJ/NY Post/other Murdoch content! Thanks Microsoft!
please. please. please. please. please. …..
Keith G
I use Bing Maps all the time. And so any ancillary searches I do end up being on Bing.
jrg
This is terrible. I won’t use Bing, so how will I find information pulled from Sean Hannity’s ass? Where will I go to find complete bullshit?
Martin
@Brian J:
No, actually it won’t. Murdoch doesn’t sell what the other papers sell. The other papers pretty much all sell the same news. Murdoch sells the news spun the way that certain people want to hear – and he’s gambling (probably rightly) that they’re willing to pay for the ‘non-liberal’ news.
What works for Murdoch might work for a Mother Jones, but sure won’t work for any mainstream newspaper. Who the hell would pay for the same API story you can get for free from the guy who hasn’t gotten around to throwing up the paywall?
No, I think Apple is going to be the savior here – or someone else doing what people think Apple is about to do. At least some publishers think this is what is going to drop soon. Basically the newspaper/magazine but with video, user-intractable content, all that jazz. By stuffing it over on a new device with more robust content than the web, presumably with the same micropayment operation that Apple has successfully sold in just about every other market too stupid to build their own, Apple would have a way to provide full subscription or individual issue purchasing of content to newsprint, magazine, and video organizations.
I think Amazon should have tackled this when they shipped Kindle, but it’s not quite the right device.
Brachiator
Uh, one of Murdoch’s UK properties is the Sun, famous for its topless Page 3 Girls.
And I wonder if Murdoch would have the balls to Bing the Times of London into a for-pay black hole?
Davis X. Machina
Vaccum is in the the wrong declension.
Vacca, vaccae, f. cow, is first declension, so the accusative singular is vaccam.
Why you want a cow in your Google is none of my business — live and let live, I say.
tripletee
I can’t believe Microsoft would even consider this. Bing is their first non-shitty search engine and has actually gotten some marketshare traction alongside favorable coverage in the tech press – do they honestly think that would continue if they went forward with a deal like this? MS has done a lot to mend its reputation in the last few years, but people still don’t like them, and only the crazies trust Murdoch’s media cesspool. What happens when a story critical of Fox News is ranked lower in Bing than in Google, even if it’s just due to a simple difference in search algorithms?
Ballmer needs to throw a big fucking chair at whoever came up with this idea. If it was him, all the better.
bago
As a softie for more than a decade, I can say that
A. The manager that thought this was a good idea is a fucking idiot who needs to be canned immediately.
B. Bing is much more verb oriented in a semantic sense when parsing queries. It’s an interesting approach and I welcome this kind of diversity.
C. Seriously, whoever decided to turn Microsoft into a issue politically is fucked. Yeah there’s lots of nouveau riche wanting to “protect” their stock gains from “teh taxes”, because they really need the 200 dollars a month to pay down the fraction of the interest their stepford wives are charging on their credit card at bellevue square, but shit jesus, status climbers like that tend to be weeded out after a few years.
Pseudonym
Bing Is Not Google.
soonergrunt
I’ve used it a little. mainly I go to google because of habit. Also I’m using Ubuntu on my primary surfing computer and that defaults Firefox to google.
Shrug.
Xanthippas
What an incredibly stupid idea. Who is going to go to Bing to get content that they can’t get through Google, in such numbers that it would make a difference to News Corp, Google or Microsoft? No one.
There. I believe that 100% accurate opinion now qualifies me as a technology and media expert.
Joshua Norton
Let’s make a list of every “good idea” that MS has ever had that turned into major suckage and circled the drain after a year or two.
Anyone who deals with and/or makes a major investment in “Anything” 2.0 deserves exactly what they get.
Morbo
@cgp: Doesn’t take much to be better than Google maps. Their problem I think is that they’re trying to integrate it with this, that, and the other thing and never really got all the kinks worked out on the actual geography. It is cool to zoom in on Manhattan on Google Earth and actually have a 3D landscape, but it sucks if you end up on 3rd street when you’re looking for Third Avenue in Anytown USA.
asiangrrlMN
Wait, so Bing is the stupid thing Microsoft takes me to when it thinks I don’t want the URL I want? No! I will use teh Google Machine, thankyewverymuch.
MikeJ
It’s pretty close to what it was when it was branded “live”. It’s the default search in ie, it’s never going to drop below 10%.
Brian J
@Martin:
Well, I wouldn’t put The Journal or maybe The Times of London in that league, but you’re correct in that his properties tend to pitch things.
Still, you’re coming at this from several disconnected angles. For one thing, nobody is proposing that Associated Press articles would be charged for. What they are claiming is that unique content–some of it, by the way, not all of it–would be thrown up behind a wall.
When you suggest what I think you are suggesting, which is that for a specialized product people might be more willing to pay, you’re right. But what’s in the New York Post, for instance, isn’t that different from other, ideologically similar but free sources, from what I can tell–much in the same way there’s no massive difference between, say, The New York times and The Washington Post. If one product similar to another product is able to charge for content, the others will be a lot more open to the idea. I suspect a lot of them are very reluctant to try it because they fear a permanent drop off in traffic and nobody wants to be the one to bite the bullet.
de stijl
Being newly infected with a redirect worm (which my G-D anti-virus software and my M-f’ing anti-malware software didn’t object to when in it burrowed in, I’ve been recently acquainted with Bing (or as I call it “Chanandler”).
Bing was one of a few web search engines that actually loaded (for a while, now it doesn’t as well).
I’m now reduced to Excite until I can figure out how to fix my Hosts file which Spybot Search And Destroy seems unable to do . Grr! (I can’t even find the goddamn thing in the DOS directory – and fuck me if I ever have to enter another line command again in my life!)
As a search engine Bing is okay. (Or was, in my case.) Not great, okay. Googlish.
It’s interesting how we come to depend on something like Google or any software / application / utility until something remarkably better comes along and we hear about and try it, and people we know and trust say it’s amazing and then we change our habits and use it.
Hyping happens, but hype doesn’t propel a similar, but not discernibly superior product to overcome the dominant player. The “Wow! That’s cool!” and more so, the “Hey! I couldn’t do that before” are what drives the decision into the Ease / Utility matrix to adopt the new over the old. You don’t have to be a factor better, but you have to be appreciably better by a large margin to engender the switch.
Bing is not a Google killer. It is a Google imitator.
We don’t change our habits for an imitator.
If I had access to a better search engine I would quote and cite the actual text for this thought: if you want to face the king you’d better kill him.
But my searches are restricted to Excite, so I suck.
BTW, Excite rules. (please pay me, I’m the only fan you have)
MikeJ
@de stijl:
c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
MikeJ
@MikeJ: Most people would throw some backwards slashes in there.
FYWP
LM
I’ve been researching A. Mitchell Palmer, of Palmer Raids fame, for quite a while, always using google. Then I tried bing, and I was stunned how much more interesting and detailed material came up. Google can be crazy-making with all the chaff and nonsense. Maybe it was just the luck of the draw, but on this, bing was lightyears better.
One amusing, if not really usable, thing it pulled up was this Time magazine list of worst cabinet members ever:
WORST CABINET MEMBERS
1. A. Mitchell Palmer – Attorney General, 1919-1921
2. Albert Fall – Secretary of the Interior, 1921-1923
3. Robert McNamara – Secretary of Defense, 1961-1968
4. Earl Butz – Secretary of Agriculture, 1971-76
5. John Mitchell – Attorney General, 1969-1972
6. James Watt – Secretary of the Interior, 1981-1983
7. Hazel O’Leary – Secretary of Energy, 1993-1997
8. Donald Rumsfeld – Secretary of Defense, 1975-77, 2001-2006
9. Michael Brown – Director of FEMA*, 2003-2005
10. Alberto Gonzales – Attorney General, 2005-2007
de stijl
@MikeJ:
Yeah. I know the path. Spybot S&D can’t access the file and the hosts file can’t be accessed (or found) via a windows TE or DOS.
Double Grr!
PS – What maroon thought “etc” was an acceptable name in a file system other than the root?
Thanks for the thought, though. Cheers!
tripletee
@MikeJ:
The underlying engine is basically Live Search, but they did a lot of work on how results are presented. Along with the massive interface improvements, Bing is way more useable than Live Search ever was (I instantly fled whenever I landed on Live by mistake because I hated it so much).
And yeah, whatever search engine is the IE default is going to have a certain base marketshare, but Bing has actually shown positive (and continuing) growth. It’s not like they’re going to suddenly topple Google, but if they get their shit together with Yahoo, they’ll at least be a somewhat respectable competitor, which is more
than they could ever say for Live.
Google is still my daily driver, though. Bing is good, but not
good enough to get me to switch.
de stijl
Back slashes are for wimps.
Texpunk
Hazel O’Leary is made up, right?
Earl Butz, also, too.
de stijl
What maroon thought “etc” was an acceptable name in a file system other than the root?
Root, twig, whatevs!
parksideq
Gizmodo explains better than I can why this is actually a horrible move for end users (i.e., us).
Sure it would be fun to see News Corp. disappear in an internet black hole, but what if Viacom, Time Warner, etc., follow the Australian Pied Piper of Media’s lead and fragment their online hubs over various search engines? It almost doesn’t matter if it’s a good idea or not, or even if the media corporations profit off something like this; it’ll become a pain in the ass just to find things online.
I’m going to quote Limbaugh here and say that I hope he (Murdoch) fails. It demonstrates yet again that News Corp. doesn’t give a rat’s ass about how it’s destroying media, both online and off.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Right, and our clocks all flash 12:00 all the time because we can’t figure out how to set them.
Har de fucking har.
mcd410x
Completely off topic, but re-watching Season 1 of Angel … very close to Darla in a box!!
Excellent TV.
noncarborundum
@MTmofo:
I would probably add Sir Rudolf Bing, but that’s just me.
Anne Laurie
The argument I’ve seen is that Murdoch, as King of Teh Olds, has decided to secure his prop’ty within a virtual gated community just as so many of his fellow Olds decide to secure their prop’ty inside the RL walls. He wants to sell a sanitized version of news to the kind of people who would buy a “corrected conservative” version of the Bible they claim to rever as the infallible word of their god — in other words, the target Fox News viewer. People who don’t want to be challenged by information that doesn’t conform to their preconceptions. Sure, it’s a niche market, but Rupert is quite old, and it’ll probably be a secure niche for the remainder of his lifespan. And after he’s gone, his latest wife, aka “the ChiCom Mole”, can try using the same techniques to prop up his legacy as are being used for The Great Firewall. It only looks odd to us Reality-Based Community faddists, because we’re stupidly convinced that facts are “correct” or “incorrect”, which are not the metrics in which Murdoch is interested.
Martin
@Brian J:
Part of the reason that the papers are afraid of the paywall is that there’s risk in it. If it fails, you’re fucked – you’ll never get that traffic back fast enough when you take the wall down for the advertisers to pay the bills.
What instead needs to happen is a value-add solution that doesn’t risk what already works. Yeah, the ad dollars aren’t coming in fast enough, but any solution to cash-strapped companies needs to guarantee more revenue – any substantial monkeying with the web revenue model is too risky. A new publication vector that these outfits could shunt new, premium content to would fit the bill. It would allow them to add content – video, whatever – that the web currently doesn’t always do well.
I think people are wrong to suggest that people won’t pay. People pay all the time. Apple is making a fuckton of money on the premise that people will pay for good hardware, for apps for their phone, for music, for movies, and so on. What people want is access to the content they want and an easy, affordable way to pay.
Apple’s great innovation isn’t Get a Mac ads, or small music players or any of that shit. Apple’s great innovation is being able to sell stuff online for $1 in less time than it takes to open your wallet while making enough money for themselves and the content producer. It doesn’t make scads of money for Apple directly, but those iPhones and iPods sure as hell are making a lot of money. And it’s working well enough that Apple passed both Amazon and WalMart and is the largest music retailer out there. Not many people pass WalMart on sales.
But the point is that a LOT of people are willing to spend money on stuff – even on stuff that they can get for free – but you have to make it wicked easy to do. Give them a week subscription for $1, a year for $25, one click and you’re done. No phone call, no worries about turning it off, no extra monthly bill to pay, that kind of crap. They need to feel like they’re getting something out of the deal – and that can be content, convenience, a better experience, etc. There’s a lot of room for that in the print space. I think Kindle is already proving that point – and publishers were willing to give Kindle a shot because it didn’t require they change their print revenue model at all – it was all add-on. If it failed, they lost nothing but the cost of producing the electronic version which is trivial.
noncarborundum
@Pseudonym:
They stole that from Richard Stallman: Gnu’s Not Unix.
Will
Once. Just once.
gwangung
@Martin: Bingo!
de stijl
@Texpunk:
Hazel O’Leary is made up, right?
During Clinton time, whenever Hazel O’Leary was mentioned on the news, I always thought about that lady whose cow kicked over a lamp in Chicago to bad effect back in the day.
Earl Butz, also, too.
I wish Earl Butz was made up. What a fucking catastrophe he was.
Sly
Earl Butz and James Watt we’re both tools, but they resigned over saying stupid shit and not for being either incompetent or criminal. And I don’t think Hazel O’Leary should even be on the list. Travel expenses? Are they serious? That makes her worse than the point man for Katrina?
That the above three were considered worse than Rumsfeld, Brown, or Gonzales leads me to believe the list was published prior to January 20th of this year.
Radon Chong
Another reason to stay away from Bing: it’ll rip you off.
terry chay
Bing has been gaining marketshare since it’s launch.
I imagine, like all other times a Microsoft Search product has gained market share following a release of a major browser or operating system upgrade, this is temporary. If Microsoft wants to chase good money after bad bribing media companies, more power to them.
I say this as someone who has thought Google is the next Microsoft since 2004, so there is no love there.
Morbo
In other media crash and burn news: Bill Moyers is leaving weekly TV (it’s on the NYT somewhere).
New Yorker
Bing…..Bing……that’s a nickname for Binghamton, NY, right? Yeah, I’ve been there. Saw a rock concert at the Broome County Arena. Caught a B-Mets game once. Had dinner at Theo’s, a soul food joint.
Cat
They switched their MSDN searches to use bing. It used to be awesome where you could filter results based on what version of Visual Studio you wanted or what language you wanted.
I haven’t checked to see if I can change it back since its a big step backwards in functionality.
Martin
@terry chay:
Unfortunately, Google is gaining share just as fast as Bing is. Bing isn’t beating Google, but then Google isn’t beating Bing, either. I’m not entirely sure what Microsoft’s search revenue plan is, and marketshare may not be necessarily be their goal, but if it is, they need to work quite a bit harder.
Danceswithwords
The analogy to AOL is very apt.
Back in the day, AOL tried to be the complete connection point between its users and the Internet–both in terms of actual ISP connection and in terms of AOL’s crappy browser, email service, communities, etc. (Anybody developing web applications ~2000 knows how crappy that browser was.)
Microsoft has been trying to corral users in the same way for a long time, and Bing is only the latest tentacle. It doesn’t surprise me at all that they’re paying for content that is aimed at a user base that isn’t interested in diversity of sources. I mean, in the long run, it’s a terrible business plan, but since when has any software business actually made decisions based on the long run?
Wile E. Quixote
If I were a Microsoft shareholder this deal would piss me off. All it does is transfer money from Microsoft into the pockets of News corp shareholders. How this is a good deal for Microsoft is beyond me.
Wile E. Quixote
@de stijl
Earl Butz is Brick Oven Bill’s favorite cabinet secretary evah!
Martin
@Wile E. Quixote:
Well, we don’t know about that. Google’s business model was pretty slow coming out, but in the end it looks like a good one.
Microsoft likely isn’t looking to use search to parlay ad revenues, but they might have some other strategy in mind. I’m not a big MS fan, but they aren’t one to blindly rush into something without a reasonably good plan. If this was their idea, they have something in mind (not necessarily a good plan, mind you) to make money out of it.
freelancer (itouch)
@Will:
You shouldn’t hang me on a hook, Johnny. My mother hung me on a hook once. Once.
Jason Bylinowski
Google has been my home page since 1999, when it replaced Cruel.com (may it rest in peace). It has been my homepage all this time, and I am not a “loyal customer”, or in a rut, or any one of a number of other personality traits which would prevent me from switching to another homepage. It’s simple, useful and I can get to my work calendar in one click.
I do occasionally use Bing for mapping, and although it’s a pretty interface, it just lacks the utilitarian look which google has mastered for many years now. So if Google allows itself to lose News Corp, I won’t change any habits at all: in fact, I just might start taking their whole “do no evil” more seriously from now on, as getting Fox news out of my default Google News search results would actually be quite nice. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s ever going to happen, as this is all just a bit of bluster – the end result will more than likely be status quo, which is exactly what needs to happen.
Mako
wow, Earl Butz and Jason Bylonowski, it gets weird down here in the end of a DougJ thread.
Nice work.
Mako
wow, Earl Butz and Jason Bylonowski, it gets weird down here in the end of a DougJ thread.
Nice work.
Comrade Kevin
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Back to the Springfield Retirement Castle with you, grandpa.
drag0n
Why wait for Microsoft?
Go tell Google that you would like the option to “Filter out articles from specific news sites”. They have a handy button you can click on to make the feature request.
It seems like a good feature to have anyhow.
Beauzeaux
Has anyone told Fox News that Microsoft owns a fair chunk of their arch enemy, MSNBC?
pseudonymous in nc
I heard that the in-house unpacking was “But It’s Not Google”. They couldn’t even get the recursive acronym right.
de stijl
In defense of Earl Butz, who doesn’t like tight pussy, loose shoes and a warm place to shit?
Butz’ problem was associating liking those things to one particular ethnic group.
Liking the aforementioned is undoubtedly shared across all color barriers.
(Actually, I like my shoes to fit fairly snugly. Not too pinchy, though. Maybe that’s a white guy / black guy thing. KInd of like dancing.)
Martin
@Beauzeaux:
MSNBC isn’t their arch enemy, it’s their savior. AP is Fox’s arch enemy. Fox needs someone to clearly differentiate from – MSNBC is doing that job quite nicely. If every network was MSNBC, Fox’s audience would probably double.
de stijl
What’s brown and sounds like a bell?
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Comrade Kevin:
Fine, then untie me.
de stijl
@freelancer (itouch):
You shouldn’t hang me on a hook, Johnny. My mother hung me on a hook once. Once.
Or as Judd Nelson said in Relentless: My father did that to me. Once!
Joshua Norton
Google is starting to get annoying in some big ways. Now that there’s on-line companies guaranteeing businesses that they can get them into the top 10 hits for their specialty, you don’t usually get a direct hit any more on your search query. You can end up having to drill down through 5 or more pages containing hundreds of links – most of which don’t even remotely apply to what you’re looking for. Someone will always find a way to screw up every good idea.
tavella
Only reason O’Leary is on there is because they were scrambling for a second Democratic administration one. The idea that she was worse than Gonzales or Brown is ludicrous.
Yutsano
@tavella: Yeah but they can’t put Gonzo on that list because then they’d have to confess to their enabling the Bush crime syndicate. They’re still too busy staring at their navels to get into too much introspection.
r€nato
@tripletee:
Sidekick, Vista, Ballmer slagging off the iPhone as unimportant, I’m sorry what were you saying?
r€nato
…how could I forget Zune and how it fucked MS’ PlaysForSure partners?
r€nato
Oh and the ridiculous Microsoft Marketplace… let’s see, buy 400 credits for $5, a song costs 79 credits, I want to buy eight songs, so that costs me…
…oh fuck it, I’m going to iTunes Music Store.
As an Apple shareholder since when you could buy it disgustingly cheaply earlier in this decade, I really really like how Apple manages to insert itself between content providers and the hardware people like to use to view/listen to it, and uses that content to leverage even more sales of their insanely great hardware.
That is, at first people bought iPods because they were the kind of MP3 players people really wanted, only they didn’t know it until it came along. Then iTMS came along which gave people even more reasons to own an iPod over some other MP3 player.
Same thing with the iPhone and the App Store. Apple’s not making all that much money off iTMS or the App Store; they are great reasons to own these devices however.
(A neighbor tried to brag to me recently that her Pre was better than my iPhone because the Pre can run multiple apps at once. I was too nice to ask her how many apps are available for the Pre, or if she’d ever tried using data and voice at the same time on her Verizon phone)
drunken hausfrau
Let Murdoch take his ball and put it in Microsoft’s playground… I ain’t paying for any Murdoch “content” — and see no reason to use Bing… To me, this is two LOSER corporations trying very hard to be “winners” again.
bago
@Joshua Norton: Yeah, F off. .NET, DHTML and the idea of a web desktop would all disagree with you. Photostitching to recreate a 3d space based on Fast Fourier transforms linked into a queryable graph would like to disagree. It would be even better if you F#’d off, because that would mean you understood how a functional language paradigm becomes useful in a distributed enterprise framework.
bago
@MikeJ: Dude, the branding arguments were retarded. I worked on an installer to deliver the .net framework onto windows CE.net. It was one of the most inadvertantly hilarious EULA’s ever.
JGabriel
In other news, Microsoft has made deals to be the sole content indexer for Free Republic, Stormfront, and Child Pornographers Int’l. Microsoft also approached NAMBLA, who rejected the offer, saying, “Fox News? Christ, even we aren’t that fucking low.”
.
bago
bago
@JGabriel: That is retarded on so many vectors it is hard to know where to begin. It’s like you’re are saying “microsoft bad I pee on them” and then tying them to some ideological point which has no evidentiary support that has no purview in reality.
superking
I use bing regularly at work because our office IE does not have the google searchbox installed. Sure, I could probably take five minutes and do that, but what’s the fucking point?
I also have to use bing maps for my job because it is, to my knowledge, the only map service that shows county boundaries. Yes, I often have to figure out which county I’m dealing with.
In any case, the question should be does anyone here have particular brand loyalty to google? It’s not like google is significantly less evil than microsoft is. What I need bing to do and what I need google to do is provide me with links to website containing information I am seeking. Both bing and google do that about equally well in my view. There is no reason for me to use google over bing or bing over google. It would be like refusing to use a hammer made by Craftsman tools.
anyway . . .
bjacques
Rupert Murdoch wants to be Palmer Eldritch. I can’t wait to see how that works out with his core audience and I can’t think of any group more deserving of being experimental subjects.
Brian J
@Martin:
I agree with you. It depends on the source, of course, but for a site like The New York Times that already has close to 20 million unique visitors each month, it’s very possible that just a small fraction would pay. The fee also couldn’t be too high. But imagine that just one million of the many millions who now visit a site like The Times are willing to pay $5 a month, simply for the ease of not hitting a wall when linking to all articles. If advertising stays where it is, as opposed to dropping off big or increasing which is also possible, that’s $60 million a year in new revenue. And that’s before, as you indicated, any sort of premium services are offered.
But as you said, a lot of them are nervous about trying this. Which is exactly why I think many of them are glad Murdoch is being a test dummy.
valdivia
Sort of late to the thread but I wanted to link to this On Point show about Murdoch and Google taped before the Microsoft deal was even known. It is the most amazing out of control radio show I have ever heard. Wolff was so rude he cut even the callers calling in. You have to give it a listen. It was fantastically hilarious and also some interesting points by the other guest on why Murdoch is doing this.
ricky
Piss on you, sonny. Repeatedly.
bjacques
Some friends in journalism think it’s a great idea. But the internet isn’t the problem, although it’s accelerating it. The revenue model for newspapers has always been advertising, including classified ads and subscriptions. Craigslist ate the classifieds, and a lot of advertisers have jumped to radio and TV at the expense of newspapers.
As well, newspapers either failed when they were needed (2000 election, Iraq War II and other GOP lunacy) or went down the toilet editorially about the last 10 years. The New York Times screwed the pooch on the Iraq War, while the Washington Post spent the 1990s and 2000s proving that Watergate was a fluke. Their publication of the senile ravings of Lally Weymouth prefigured Fred Hyatt’s stewardship of the op-ed pages. It’s hard to defend the country’s great newspapers when they give lunatics equal time and on the same footing with relatively sane people, and when they gut newsgathering while renewing contracts of gold-plated stiffs like French Fry Friedman and David Fucking Brooks.
The internet isn’t the problem; walling it off it isn’t the solution. It’ll save newspapers like secret copyright treaties will save the music industry.
As for putting video behind the paywall, then BitTorrent it or watch something else. There aren’t enough hours in the day to watch it all anyway.
Brian J
@bjacques:
I think it depends on how it’s done and what sort of path the newspapers take. A lot fewer people will pay for bland, relatively unoriginal content in a major paper that they can also get from CNN, but if the papers use new revenue (and subsequent breathing room) to distinguish themselves and actually make a subscription worthwhile, it could work. Think of the reasons people pay for The Wall Street Journal, without as much emphasis on business.
Bellwetherman
This would be a public relations disaster for Microsoft. Emeritus President Gate is off funding scientific and educational projects and receiving lots of good press, but the company he created is casting its lot with the Tasmanian Devil? Many centrist Americans would like to find a way to deport the Murdoch and his entire foul clan.
bjacques
@Brian J:
Good point, but I think newspapers will expect the paywall to save them so they won’t have to reform or work on a better business model. There was nothing stopping them from doing this before. Firing Doughbob Loadpants and using the money to beef up their city desk again, or maybe buy back into an international pool, or just hire someone to add depth to or investigate stuff they get from AP or Reuters, the LA Times could have done that anytime.
My main beef is the syndicated editorials. Knowing how much these guys get for downright stupid and/or dishonest analysis, it’s like paying for someone to fart in my face every day.
FWIW, I subscribe to one of the major papers here. They’re Dutch, so the language is enough of an effort that I can read as much or as little of the op-ed as I like. I also get the Int’l Herald Tribune through a friend. Half of their op-ed comes from the Boston Globe and half from the NYT. So to get Paul Krugman, Frank Rich and Nicholas Kristoff, I have to put up with David F. Brooks, Ross Douchehat and Jeff “goddamn kids, get off my lawn!” Jacoby.
Jason
What, you guys talking about something? I was hanging out on MySpace, which is just really awesome these days. I used MySpace’s custom Google search function to find this thread, aamof, and th—hey, wait a second…
oh ummm btw @Joshua Norton Photostitching to recreate a 3d space based on Fast Fourier transforms linked into a queryable graph would like to disagree I mean no offense but that’s just the way Photostitching is about stuff
“The idea of a web desktop”? Seriously? DHTML, sure, I can see that, I mean quirks mode is like god’s gift to the web. Eff off Joshua Norton, 2002 is here to disagree with everything you stand for! 2007 would chime in but it requires .net version 3.5, would you like to install?
BongCrosby
Bing, no.
Bong, yes.
Ajay
Yes, I do use Bing on daily basis. It replaced Google for me almost 6-7 months ago. I use FireFox with Bing.
I shifted to Bing since they started offering incentives while you shop(typically you get 2-10% off if you shop online thru Bing).
I dont see the difference between Google and Bing. Bing is more responsive. I still use Google when I visit newsgroups.
Radon Chong
@Ajay: See my comment above. You may not be getting such a good deal after all.
Coffee Milk Toast Jam
If Hollywood were to remake It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Murdoch would be cast as Mr. Potter, only with slightly more hair
raptusregaliter
@de stijl:
I can’t believe there are any Excite fans left after what they did to their email. Thanks a lot Excite: you had a clean and simple email platform that worked for years, then you replaced it with an overbuilt monstrosity that would take 7 or 8 minutes to load. On a good day.
I spent hours and hours transferring all of my stuff over to new gmail accounts, and now Excite is DEAD to me!
Ajay
@Radon Chong
Thanks. I do consider myself an astute shopper and I mainly buy technical hardware. I am familiar with what the link says. The problem is mainly with bad retailers, who did this. In my domain these are ZipZoomFly and Tigerdirect.
Keep in mind that this is not Microsoft which is doing this, instead its the retailers which do this. Its best to avoid those retailers in general.
Shell
Is this good news for John McCain?
Will
@r€nato:
The Pre is da bomb, baby. Give it a test drive, you’ll see how it stacks up. It doesn’t do everything the IPhone does, but neither does the IPhone do everything the Pre does.
Tommy
Beware of this: Some merchants are displaying higher prices when a bing cookie is in the cache – then applying discounts. If you go to site via another route, you may incur higher costs as a result of the bing cookie.
see:
Bing Cashback Can Cost You Money
Catsy
@Martin: @Martin:
I sure hope this is a joke. I could believe that this statement is true if I managed to forget almost every major Microsoft venture since WFW. Microsoft’s entire business strategy seems to revolve around trying to buy out the Next Big Thing over and over again, and touting it as the Next Big Thing regardless of how much of a turd it is.
Although to be fair, Google’s done its share of this. The latest example that comes to mind is Chrome OS, possibly one of the stupidest ideas ever to come out of Google. It’s like they’ve rediscovered dumb terminals and realized they can rebrand them as “cloud computing” and sell them to lazy consumers. Because what I really want is a computer with no persistent local storage and an inability to access any of my applications or data without an internet connection, which depends entirely on web technologies in order to function. That sound you just heard is an entire generation of Java developers crying out with the hope that they’ll be relevant again someday.
donr
Another reason to dislike Bing – censoring content on China even outside of China.
kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/20/boycott-microsoft-bing/
Paris
Faux + Microsoft.
A marriage made in heaven.
Since this looks like a net transfer of wealth from Micropsost to Murdoch, looks like you guys get to pay a few more cents for that next operating system upgrade. Call it the Murdoch tax.
JChan
I don’t know if anyone has mentioned or if anyone else has heard this, but a couple of months ago a crazed-christian relation got an email (I didn’t actually see it, but was told by mad relation) about Christians using Bing rather than Google. Thwarting satan or some such was the gist of the reason given. Do not know how widespread this email was. We have our own locally grown crazies, so this may not be nationwide, but the writer got the idea somewhere. Curious if anyone else heard this?
Joel
This is fantastic news. My setup for Google News has been plagued by FOX and WSJ propaganda, followed by meaningless “human interest” crap. I’ve been trying all sorts of filter setups but none works so well.
News is really the weak spot of Google’s creations and Murdoch would be doing them a favor by pulling out.
keenanjay
I use Bing. It’s as good as Google for my purposes.
Annamal
My organisation (small non-us government department) found that Bingmaps made the best choice for displaying certain kinds of information (something to do with the way they store GIS data I think).
The eventual tool that resulted is looking like it’s going to be pretty damn nifty for small to medium enterprises in my country.