eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Talk about the enemy of your enemy being your friend: in a Dec. 10 post on his blog, Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s director of community development, said, “Bing does have a better privacy policy than Google,” and urged users to switch Firefox to Microsoft’s search engine via an add-on.
That somewhat surprising message came three days after Google opened another front in its escalating search-engine battle against Microsoft, which is attempting to erode the search giant’s U.S. market position by adding more functionality to Bing. On Dec. 7, Google added real-time search results pulled from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace-a significant feature boost.
Executives at Google may argue, of course, that the company’s market-share position is secure; after all, it currently owns 65 percent of the market in the United States. Once Microsoft consummates its search-and-advertising partnership with Yahoo in 2010, a deal that will see Bing become the underlying search engine for Yahoo’s sites, Bing’s share of that market could rise to close to 30 percent-but even that, when you come down to it, will likely not be enough to keep those Googlers awake at night.
But Microsoft’s recent aggressive moves in the space, including the addition of the beta version of Bing Maps, emphasize that nothing in the search engine realm is static. Add to that the perception from some corners of the tech world that Google is becoming more Big Brother than Don’t Be Evil-as exemplified by Dotzler’s comments-and Google’s position seems, if not tenuous, certainly in need of reinforcement. Hence the addition of a feature like real-time search results, in order to make an already-considered-necessary tool for people seem even more necessary.
Microsoft has also embraced the real-time religion when it comes to search. Take Bing Maps, which marries the typically stolid business of online cartography with real-time features such as a Twitter feed and traffic reports. Typing “New York” into Microsoft’s maps feature, for example, will unleash a food of Tweets originating from, say, Bryant Park and every surrounding bar and restaurant; zoom into the Brooklyn Bridge, and a colored line denotes just how fouled its lanes are with rush-hour traffic.
These updates follow a whole slew of new features added to Bing in November, including a more robust video page that integrated feeds from Hulu, MSN Video and ABC. Wolfram Alpha, the computational engine designed to offer primarily numerical solutions to queries ranging from “What is 423,145 times 343?” to “What year did James Dean kick the bucket?” now offers search results on Bing.
Despite those bells and whistles, the greatest stride forward for Bing remains the Microsoft-Yahoo deal, which the two companies finalized Dec. 4. Bing takes over back-end search for Yahoo’s sites and Yahoo’s sales team will take over worldwide duties for both companies’ search advertising. If Yahoo’s current share of the U.S. search engine market ports over to Bing with no attrition, Microsoft will gain about 26.7 percent of the market-at least according to market numbers produced by Experian Hitwise in November.
“Yahoo and Microsoft welcome the broad support the deal has received from key players in the advertising industry and remain hopeful that the closing of the transaction can occur in early 2010,” the companies said in a joint statement released on Dec. 4. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, during a November trip to Tokyo, previously dangled the possibility that the agreement could eventually expand beyond the United States to the global stage-all of that depending, of course, on whether the U.S. Department of Justice clears the deal, something that neither Microsoft nor Yahoo has seemed publicly concerned about.
The following week for Microsoft was one of warnings, acquisitions and announcements of future plans.
Microsoft Keeps Moving
On Dec. 7, Microsoft discontinued sales of the Windows 7 Family Pack, which featured three Windows 7 Home Premium licenses for $179. Microsoft claimed that the Family Pack had always been a limited-quantity offer-“The Windows 7 Family Pack was introduced as a limited-time offer while supplies last in select geographies,” was how a Microsoft spokesperson put it in an e-mail to eWEEK-but the announcement was nonetheless greeted by a number of message boards with anger and something approaching incredulity.
“This is the simplest thing for Microsoft to implement-licensing that makes sense for end users,” one commenter wrote on the Windows IT Pro site. “Microsoft-Fix this! Family packs just make sense for about a million reasons and are common sense.”
To install Windows 7 Home Premium on three PCs will now cost around $357 for three copies of the upgrade version, although resellers on Amazon.com and other retail sites were offering copies of the Family Pack at a considerable markup over the original $179 price point.
The Family Pack had been announced as part of a wave of promotions for Windows 7 ahead of its Oct. 22 release, and the company evidently seemed to regard it as more of a gimmick than the beginning of a longer-term bulk-licensing offering. Perhaps Microsoft believed that the Family Pack and associated discounts had done their job; based on early indications, Windows 7 will perform better in the short term than Windows Vista, with a report by statistics company Net Applications suggesting that Windows 7’s share of the overall PC market passed 4 percent by Nov. 9, outpacing its predecessor’s rate of adoption.
Microsoft also received some flack from the open-source community over its WUDT (Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool), which it removed from the online Microsoft Store in November due to allegations that it contained improperly copied open-source code. On Dec. 9, Microsoft restored the WUDT, supposedly revamped to follow the GNU GPLv2 (General Public License Version 2).
Microsoft previously claimed that a third-party developer was responsible for copying the open-source code that put the original WUDT in violation of GPLv2. The free code for the WUDT can be found here, and the tool can be downloaded directly from the Microsoft Store through this link.
Microsoft also took a moment the week of Dec. 7 to warn users that support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP Service Pack 2 would end in July 2010, perhaps attempting to goad at least a subset of those customers into migrating to Windows 7.
Windows 2000 Server and Client support will also end on July 13, 2010, but customers who jump to Windows XP SP3 will have extended support until April 8, 2014. According to a report by research company Forrester, 80 percent of all commercial PCs were running Windows XP right before Windows 7’s release.
There is no direct upgrade path from Windows XP to Windows 7, although Microsoft has set up a Migration Guide that can be found here. The company has also created an End-of-Support Solution Center for Windows 2000, found here.
Microsoft ended the week with announcements of two acquisitions. The first, Sentillion, is a privately held health care IT company that specializes in developing identity and access management technology for hospitals and caregivers. Microsoft said it intends to invest in Sentillion’s technologies along with its own, while leaving the smaller company to deal with customer acquisition and management.
The second company, Opalis Software, produces software that helps automate and streamline workflow processes within data centers. Along with that announcement on Dec. 11, Microsoft indicated that Opalis’ software would be integrated into Microsoft System Center. The Opalis acquisition follows a pattern of large IT companies such as Microsoft purchasing outside automation and integration vendors and bringing their technologies in-house, and is reminiscent in some ways of past deals such as Hewlett-Packard’s for Opsware. Other IT process automation technology vendors, such as NetIQ, remain independent.
The new functionality and markets presented by those companies may help Microsoft overcome any pain from being dumped by the French military.