12 ms·

Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

322 points by domino 16y ago

latch 16y ago
The OP seems to attribute the "failure" of bing to common problems associated with Microsoft (in specific) and large companies (in general). With a specific point that it all started wonderfully, then got corporatized. I'm happy believing that this was the main problem. But...as an end user i don't think Bing was/is ever as as close to Google as the OP seems to think.
- kami8844 16y ago
  I had to do some web scraping for an application that I recently wrote and only when my app's performance started to rely on the results provided by the various search engines out there, I started to fully appreciate how good Google is. It's just no comparison; in edge cases, misspelled and unconventional searches (where it really matters) Google completely creams the competition. While Bing came closest to providing search results as accurate as Googles it still wasn't at any comparable level, so all in all I agree with your point.
- exit 16y ago
  why was kami8844's comment instantly flagged? it's really disgusting to see people quietly being blacklisted. --- 1 point by kami8844 0 minutes ago | link [dead] I had to do some web scraping for an application that I recently wrote and only when my app's performance started to rely on the results provided by the various search engines out there, I started to fully appreciate how good Google is. It's just no comparison; in edge cases and unconventional searches (where it really matters) Google completely creams the competition. While Bing came closest to providing search results as accurate as Googles it still wasn't at any comparable level, so all in all I agree with your point. ---
  - Joakal 16y ago
    Was the reporter respected or the system assume a new reporter weight is the same as a veteran user to hide it? If so, don't give too much weight to new reporters for flagging.
  - gjm11 16y ago
    I wonder whether it's an automatic consequence of having substantial negative karma. (I'm ambivalent about the stealth-blacklisting thing. It's probably the right thing to do with genuinely abusive users. It might be the right thing with people genuinely incapable of contributing much. But I've seen too many cases where someone's comments are all being auto-deaded -- invisibly to them, AIUI -- with no obvious reason why they should deserve it.)
    - jules 16y ago
      Right, the system is far too trigger happy. Instead of showing a newcomer what kind of comments are valued here and possibly gaining a valuable new contributor, the system severely punishes beginner mistakes. We can't reasonably expect that a new user knows what kind of comments are valued because on the rest of the internet such comments are perfectly acceptable. Perhaps something like Quora does would help: before you can use the site you have to do a quiz on what kind of comments are good comments.
      - pohl 16y ago
        Just for counterpoint: it would be easy for new users to figure out what a good post is by reading and paying attention to the scores they get. One gets a sense for what makes one a -4, another a mere zero, or some other a +47.
      - redthrowaway 16y ago
        "Perhaps something like Quora does would help: before you can use the site you have to do a quiz on what kind of comments are good comments." Really? Sorry, but that sounds like a terrible idea. HN is already insular enough, we don't need to start demanding newcomers pass a test before we let them comment.
        jules 16y ago
        Let's see. There are two groups of people: people who would have passed the test and people who would not have. The people who would not have would most likely be hellbanned after their first 3 comments (and of course people are allowed to take the test as many times as they want). So you lose nothing. By using a test fewer legitimate people get hellbanned. In other words, this is only going to improve the situation. I'm not talking about a difficult test here: just a couple of questions like: Comment: LOL Is this an acceptable comment? Right now people are used to that being an acceptable comment on the rest of the internet. These people currently get hellbanned on HN because other people downvote these comments. It's not a test for testing whether the people are acceptable on HN, it's method of teaching customs and a test for whether people have read the guidelines.
  - ricree 16y ago
    Looks like he's a new user that got mostly downvotes on his early comments. In isolation, I can't entirely disagree the downvotes, but it seems to me that the system ought to be more tolerant of people that screw up their first couple posts as long as they were honest contributions (as opposed to spam). Perhaps the ban should be triggered a lot more heavily on flags than downvotes up to a certain number of posts. A karma based ban that makes some sense for people that are consistently bad. But it seems to me that the current ban code doesn't give newcomers enough chance to change based on the feedback they've been given. New users don't have a buffer to fall back on if they make one or two bad posts, and ought to be given more leeway. As long as people are flagging correctly, that should take care of obvious trolls or spam.
  - kami8845 16y ago
    Thanks for pointing that out, as others have written below, I'm a new user and while the system here looks pretty similiar to the one at Reddit, the type of comment that is appreciated here seems vastly different. I was kind of surprised to instantly receive 3 downvotes for my first comment that just expressed my happiness to have found this community, and while it was pretty void of content, the rules expressly state that empty comments can be OK if they are positive. I agree that the system is quite a bit too trigger-happy. Being shadowbanned is a pretty shitty spot to be in and I don't think 9 downvotes over 4 comments qualify for such harsh punishment.
    - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
      >I don't think 9 downvotes over 4 comments qualify for such harsh punishment Personally I'd say that depends. If you have a positive comment history then no you sholdn't be banned for a small run of comments that the community finds unhelpful to the conversation. If all of your first comments are downvoted then I suggest you make a new account and wait until you have something positive to say. Note that positive doesn't mean affirming groupthink, or karma whoring (which is hard here but looks possible) but adding to the conversation. An opposing opinion well expressed often won't win a lot of upvotes but it usually gets more ups than downs.
      - dhimes 16y ago
        Part of the problem is that downvoting is used to express disagreement. We have this discussion often on HN (perhaps too often): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 Note: the following unexpectedly turned into a bit of a rant, with a dose of whining thrown in: Many of us "old-timers" think that downvoting without giving a reason is mostly bad form (the exception is for a rude or obnoxious comment). I've personally noticed an increase in this behavior. I believe that doing so decreases the user experience. I've had plenty of disagreements over the years and have almost always learned something from them (even if it just required me to do a bit of soul-searching). Posts would be painstakingly composed (one of the big complaints we had was that the post-page timed out while we were composing- so we had to result in using a separate editor to compose, then click "reply" and copy-and-paste. But now-- why bother? I've been around a while. I'm on my second (third?) career. Not a hacker extraordinaire by any means, but I'm well educated technically and have maintained my involvement with a broad array of interests (I like to learn new things). I've seen some things, and I'm willing to share- and even be challenged in my own conclusions about them. But when I make a post that the "average HN-er" (age 25, so I hear) may not think is very smart and I immediately get downvoted with no reason given, it sends a signal that HN has changed in a very dramatic way. The site is far less valuable than it used to be.
- Diabeetus 16y ago
  I don't know how good Bing was, but Google put a lot of work into modernizing it's website after the launch of Bing so maybe they did see it as a threat.
  - levesque 16y ago
    Probably they just wanted to make sure they stayed ahead of Bing on all levels. Like Apple is doing right now with the iPad.
- encoderer 16y ago
  Speaking qualitatively, I disagree. I actually use them interchangeably. When I'm using IE (testing features), if I have to search, I just search from the location bar, which defaults to Bing. I feel like the results are essentially the same and I never recall having trouble finding what I'm looking for in Bing. Though I suppose one huge omission is the date filter. I use that a lot on Google and certainly miss it sometimes on Bing. Most importantly, Google was essentially stagnant for years until Bing came along. Since then they've really upped their game. They cloned Bing image search. They took the context summary in Bing that I loved from the beginning and one-upped it. And I've seen more natural answers in Google to match what Bing set to do from day one. I use and support Bing and you should too. What Bing did to Google is like what Firefox did to IE. It reminded them that they should be innovating still!
Hov 16y ago
I find it telling that he admits to moving on from Microsoft and trying "a long list of failed ideas" From the sounds of it, they had very little process in the beginning, which implies to me that they would have eventually failed to compete with Google anyway. He's crazy if he thinks Google has no process in place when shipping software.
scorpion032 16y ago
The biggest problem that comes in the way is the condescending attitude of the "grown ups". It is very important for the "management" to realize that they are actually only facilitating what is "happening" and they should let the system handle itself and get out of the way than get into and disturb the existing norm.
- raganwald 16y ago
  One of the most serious problems with modern "management" is that the incentives are all wrong. Imagine that I hire a programmer and pay him by the line of code. This idea has been so thoroughly debunked that it is nearly impossible to write out the consequences without sounding cliché. Yet it happens all the time: Companies promote "Architects" who are evaluated by the weight of their "architecture." The result is stultifying and demoralizing. The architect does not work to facilitate the programmer's work, he works to produce evidence of his contribution in the form of frameworks, standards, and software process. So, how are most managers evaluated? By the amount of "managing" they do, as measured by the amount of process they impose on their team. Evaluating a manager by the amount of managing they do is exactly the same thing as evaluating a programmer by the amount of code they write. And it produces results like you describe, where the manager works to produce evidence of their management in the form of processes and decisions from the top down, rather than facilitating the work actually being done. In a simplistic world, the answer would be to change the incentives and the behaviour would change itself. But as they say, "correlation does not equal causation." The incentives have to change, but so do the people. Results-oriented managers don't work in those kind of environments to begin with, and after a year or two in such a place they will already have left. You need to change the incentives and the culture and the people all together.
  - JoeAltmaier 16y ago
    Middle managers are rewarded for making budget and meeting release dates. Seems good, right? So they agitate for (wait for it) maximum budget and minimum feature set. So that success is assured and their metric is optimized. Unfortunately those things are exactly contrary to company goals. Why does this happen? {opinion} Middle managers are too remote from either customers (financial goals) or top management (company goals). They're in the middle, right? With layers between them and either end. And when you try to optimize any process with too many degrees of freedom, you have too many variables and get to choose which ones to look at. So middle managers look at their own career and ignore the rest. My suggestion: line up all middle managers in the parking lot (important), stand at the end of the line, and put one bullet through all of them (optimizes cost in bullets). If my company Ever has middle managers, its time to call it quits.
raganwald 16y ago
Perhaps a bit OT, but... The post seemed to be riddled with formatting and grammar errors. This rubbed my old-school English sensibilities at first, but then I began to enjoy its rough feel. After all, it's a post about how people who worked tirelessly to bring a product to market were shipping things while the rest of Microsoft slept. The story very clearly describes a dichotomy in Microsoft's culture between process/rules/superficial quality on the one hand and relentlessly shortening the ship/fix cycle on the other. This post is not just about shortened ship/fix cycles, it is itself an example of a shortened write/fix cycle. When that struck me, the style of post suddenly "clicked:" It was as if I was reading an email that was furiously blasted out to Posterous while the author's compiler worked, and thereafter there was no time for extensive editing and proofing by a circle of reviewers. What mattered was to get the idea out and to start the conversation, editing and polish would follow later. Great stuff!
- Ruudjah 16y ago
  It's one of those very, very scarce texts where mild swearing adds something. 99 out of 100 times, it's just deteriorating the post quality and signs of bad writership.
  - GFischer 16y ago
    Indeed. Saying "Michael fucking Burrows" made me look him up (as intended, I guess :) ) "Michael Burrows (born circa 1963) is widely known as the creator of the Burrows/Wheeler transform. He also was, with Louis Monier, one of the two main creators of AltaVista" (which I guess was the point!). He ironically now works to Google according to Wikipedia.
    - basugasubaku 16y ago
      He is also an author of the Google Bigtable (http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html) and Chubby (http://labs.google.com/papers/chubby.html http://labs.google.com/papers/chubby.html) papers. In university, we had to read one of his earlier papers, Eraser (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.22.3256 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.22.3...).
mattmanser 16y ago
The whole article seems to be back to front. As far as I knew Live search was essentially failing then they made it Bing and it's started to succeed. Am I missing something here or what? I'm no expert on the history but it seems to me that the opposite of what the author is saying actually happened!
- cicero 16y ago
  You have an outsider perspective, while the article was written from an insider's perspective. It appears that the technology team was at its peak when it changed from Live to Bing, and has declined since then. The success of Bing has been due to marketing, but without a sound technical team behind it, it's going to die.
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    It appears that the technology team was at its peak when it changed from Live to Bing, and has declined since then. This is the take from one insider. I suspect if you were talk to someone else on the Bing team you may get a very different story.
- nchlswu 16y ago
  I think that's one of the objectives of this article; provide that alternate perspective. I thought that Bing was the true turning point as well, but I never gave Live Search a fair chance then, and I don't think many others did either. To me, it looks like the author saw Bing/Live Search as something truly transformational within Microsoft. Public perception was that Live was a failure. But if I understand currently, the team was easily beating internal estimates extremely fast . For one reason or another there was a team reorganization that coincided with the PowerSet acquisition and the Bing rebrand. While there was a jump in market share, the foundation of the Bing team was taken out from under them and replaced with MS status quo. Bing's death isn't a result of their success or failure as a search engine. Bing's death refers to the loss of something that could have made a difference in Microsoft, internally. The death of a team that could have done something truly great , (EDIT: as said by Cicero, when they were at their peak).
tocomment 16y ago
Bing is dead?
- bartl 16y ago
  Well, according to this post, everyone who was technically knowledgeable about Bing has left. That implies that there will no longer be any relevant technical progress, any more.
  - cdesmar 16y ago
    Not sure this is relevant progress but 18 march bing for "HG download" gave no mercurial results (hg was assumed to be a mistyping of HD), by 24 march it was giving all mercurial results. I twittered about both. That is at least anecdotal evidence that things are progressing in some way or another.
    - mithaler 16y ago
      That's not necessarily a change in the codebase, that could be the system learning from associations in queries and results it gets over time (something I know Google does and has for years, at least).
    - code_duck 16y ago
      Unpredictability is progress?
      - cdesmar 16y ago
        Returning meaningful results is progress. Why would you want a predictably wrong answer, you must be a manager.
        code_duck 16y ago
        Actually, you've plotted two data points here. That doesn't tell you much. How do you know it doesn't go back to showing irrelevant results on the 28th?
jeremydavid 16y ago
Just thought I'd let you know your text rendered very small on my browser, and the light grey quotes were almost unreadable.
- steve-howard 16y ago
  Indeed, I have no idea why bloggers are so insistent on using gray-on-white quotations.
InclinedPlane 16y ago
I don't know that Bing has "failed" yet, but I highly doubt it'll be anything other than one amongst many in the pack in 5 years. Microsoft has always been good at the pivotal turnaround. Recognizing when a key moment was on the wind, mustering together a tremendous effort, making a good number of smart decisions and putting out a solid anchor product that (re)cements their position in the industry and reinvigorates the brand in doing so. Windows 95 and Windows 7 are perfect examples. IE4 (yes really), Bing, and Windows Phone 7 are also good examples. One of the big problems with Microsoft is that its organization and its culture are extremely tied to the traditional 3-ish year ship cycle. A hugely successful diving catch every other ship cycle or so is rapidly becoming less and less feasible as a means to hang on to or acquire a market. Microsoft does not seem to get the web at a fundamental level, it doesn't seem to have the capacity to release software at a pace of yearly, monthly, or continuously. And that will ultimately be the undoing of Bing and the Windows Phone. The only way MS knows how to crank out releases faster is the deathmarch, and that is a certain route to doom. Worse yet, since Gates left MS has no real technical or managerial leadership, it's bureaucracy all the way up and down. This has been affecting the culture at Microsoft little by little, also partly coupled to the stock price having plateaued. More and more talented devs are finding that MS lacks the excitement and the reward of cutting edge development, so they are moving elsewhere. Also, without that talent around fewer good projects are pushed forward, fewer projects succeed, people become less satisfied with their jobs, etc. (think about the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" only translate the bad stuff, on a corporate level, to hundreds and then thousands of George Bailey's going away). This makes the environment that much less rewarding for everyone else who remains, so yet more people leave. And slowly but surely the creep of a more rigid and bureaucratic corporate culture and organization fills in the gaps left by the people who had the most clout in the company, causing yet more and more talent to evaporate away. It's a self-reinforcing cycle that will lead to the rapid diminution of the company and its prospects over time and the examples the article provides of the process as it happened at Bing have played out throughout the company. Nobody young with high prospects seriously considers Microsoft as a destination anymore, and increasingly the older devs are either retiring on their massive earnings from the glory days or they're just looking for somewhere else to be that's a better use of their time and talent. MS continues to make a crap-ton of money from its core products, but it will be institutionally ham-strung in responding to the threats that will steal away that revenue (such as mobile-heritage operating systems). Because those threats will grow at a rate MS is incapable of competing with.
hanifvirani 16y ago
Strange. To me, as an outsider, it looks like Bing has just started to get good enough to be considered as a threat to Google. Of course, they have a long long way to go. But it appears as a rapidly emerging product rather than a dying product.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  I agree. It was only in the last year that I could use Bing as my primary search engine.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
fferen 16y ago
For all the people saying X search engine is better, here's a tool to compare Google and Bing (and Yahoo) results without bias. It simply shows you three columns of results, you click on the one with the best results, and it reveals which ones came from which search engines. http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ Note: I am not affiliated with this site in any way.
- danvet 16y ago
  I've seen this site before and frankly I think it's rather irrelevant. Recent innovations (past years) in search are mostly spelling corrections/related topics suggestions, visual presentation of aggregated results (how many images, results from suggestions) and stuff like that. The pure ranking order delivered on a fixed search is more and more useless, the imo important part is how the search engine guides you until you've found the correct search query that delivers what you're actually looking for.
- GFischer 16y ago
  Hmmm, it's giving me the wrong results... it shows the results I voted from are from "Bing", but when I went to Google it showed me those results, and Bing's results where the ones marked "Yahoo". See here http://blindsearch.fejus.com/?q=21+de+setiembre+y+sarmiento&type=web http://blindsearch.fejus.com/?q=21+de+setiembre+y+sarmiento&... it would have me believe that Bing's were the better results (they weren't for this particular search). Also, when I'm logged in and using my country-specific search, Google is way, way, way better than the competition. Edit: I'll probably message the creator (parent is not affiliated with the site)
tedsbardella 16y ago
The web site he is promoting is very creepy.
dvfer 16y ago
Bing is not really providing anything more than google's service. It only shows "big company's" routine of trying to drive others out of business. Death for Bing.
- parfe 16y ago
  I disagree. I remembered Bing's decision engine commercials when looking for a plane ticket. Turns out that Bing is way better for flights than Google is, by far. Just try typing New York City to Los Angeles into both search engines. Bing finds what you are after and Google does not.
  - kami8845 16y ago
    I prefer how Google handles that search query. If you're looking for a flight does entering 'fly' after your two destinations really hurt that much? 'to' is -more often than not - a pretty meaningless keyword, and I'm pretty sure most people don't want half of what's above the fold to be taken up by flight information if all they enter is a very general 'New York City to Los Angeles'.
    - parfe 16y ago
      It's not just the flight specific widget bing has, but the fact is consolidates several sites worth of data into a single interface. On Google you don't get a unified view of data. The ticket vendor is not important to me. It's only the flight cost and number of stopovers that matter, which google does not help with.
franklindholm 16y ago
Is this written in English?
rjhackin 16y ago
I am not sure about the death of Bing, Bing has momentum and they should take it forward and not lose ground. Competition is important to bring the best out of technology.
RyanMcGreal 16y ago
> They totally din't see Google as a threat, till it had a huge market cap. (Don't be evil, was a joke?) Does having a huge market cap automatically make a company evil?
- dstein 16y ago
  Not automatically. But I think it would be easy to prove there's a correlation between market cap and corruption.
  - antiterra 16y ago
    If it would be easy, then perhaps you should do it. Such a conclusion would have a nice amount of academic value. I imagine there are a large number of small and/or untraded businesses with dishonest or illegal practices. Perhaps data would even show that larger market cap indicates corruption is less likely, depending on your measurement for corruption?
jdp23 16y ago
Interesting perspectives. I was there in 2006-2007 when they made the decision to throw resources at the problem and challenge Google head-on in algorithmic search. The strategy at the time was to become #2 in a duopoly by investing at a level that Yahoo! couldn't compete with, and focus on the most valuable searches (travel, shopping, etc.), and leverage Microsoft Research a lot more. From an abstract business perspective it's worked remarkably well. But if so many motivated and talented people are leaving, then there's something fundamentally flawed. And there were a lot of other much-less-expensive approaches they could have taken instead (or in addition, if they wanted to shoot for the moon) that would have also created a lot more opportunities for growth and excitement for younger engineers in particular. Ah well.
Matt_Cutts 16y ago
"They [Bing] had weekly release cycles - faster than Google back then" Hmm. I'm gonna have to disagree with that part. :)
- myprasanna 16y ago
  Matt, How long would you estimate, for a search changelist to hit the production at Google? I've got friends working there. Prepare to be surprised.
  - hexis 16y ago
    I think you've got a bit of a surprise in store for you, too, when you find out what Matt does for a living.
    - myprasanna 16y ago
      Got it :) I still know for a fact that, it takes at-least a month on average, for a search change list to reach production. Would you disagree Matt?
      - shadowmatter 16y ago
        I'm an ex-Googler, and I disagree. Before I left the GWS team (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/29/google_web_server/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/29/google_web_server/) became a model for how frequent, stable releases should be done within the company. That's all I'll say.
        myprasanna 16y ago
        I've just recently spoken with my friends, and I know for a fact that it atleast takes a month from point of checkin to review/test/stage/production. If you disagree, I think what you are talking about, is probably an exception and not the norm. Being secretive about release cycles is pointless stealth.
rorrr 16y ago
> Bing was extremely lavish in compensation, making offers to the best hackers for $90K/year Is this a joke?
- aChrisSmith 16y ago
  No. Remember the article talked about poaching students right out of college. $90k a year isn't much for an experienced developer, however right out of college (and at the time) that was 10-20k more than they could expect joining another company.
  - rorrr 16y ago
    "experienced hackers" and "students right out of college" are quite different in my world view.
enjo 16y ago
This is tangential, but somehow related: My level of frustration Redmond has reached epic levels. My company spends thousands of dollars a week managing advertising campaigns on Adcenter. They have an API which has been nothing but issues, but given the breadth of our advertising base it's absolutely necessary that we use it. Today we have entered day number FIVE of an outage in which the API (at least one critical portion of it) simply errors out no matter what call you make. So for five days we've been unable to pause campaigns, change bid prices, or otherwise do anything to effectively manage our campaigns. It's nuts. This is the second major outage in the last couple of weeks. The part that KILLS me is that nobody in Redmond seems to give a damn. They announced that they had a problem two days after I brought it to their attention. They are apparently working on some sort of fix that may or may not be pushed sometime in the last three days. Meanwhile we are absolutely blowing through cash because of the things that we can't adjust. We're tens of thousands of keywords spread out over more than a thousand campaigns. We don't employ anybody to manage these by hand...
- forwardslash 16y ago
  I assume you're using the REST API? While they try and roll out a fix, have you tried to use the adCenter Desktop to at least somewhat manage the ads?
  - AJ007 16y ago
    That might work if adcenter desktop was actually stable!
    - forwardslash 16y ago
      Unfortunately it's still technically in 'beta' so it intermittently has issues. I still use it everyday, though.
    - robryan 16y ago
      That would be of little comfort I'd imagine if you had a lot of custom stuff running through the API. At least they opened the thing up recently to add customers, that's a step in the right direction. (Although that could also be the cause of instability, they did have years to prepare for it though.)
rebelidealist 16y ago
Would you consider likealittle.com a startup? The definition of a startup is company with a limited operating history and a company is an organization aimed at making profits.
wightnoise 16y ago
The only value I ever had for Bing was their cashback shopping engine, and they've gotten rid of that. Birth and Death of Jellyfish.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jellyfish.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jellyfish.com
TheCondor 16y ago
A buddy and I were drinking months back, and for whatever reason (most likely several beers was the reason) he misinterpreted the Bing and Facebook arrangement that was made for "Facebook is buying Bing." Completely un-Microsoft, I can't see it happening but if it did.. Damn that could make things interesting. Bing is interesting, it's a great attempt. The problem is Microsoft, so long as they're running it and setting the "standard" for it, it's going to be a failure. It's not going to knock Google off their perch. It's just not. And anything less than that will be a failure. Cut that team and product free, hand it over to like a facebook? IBM went through some similar stuff, MS should be spinning stuff out, if their current phone effort fails again to live up to their hype, they should just cut that group free too, let them go and be successful. that stuff creates new industries which in turn create new opportunities for everybody, including MS. Let Bing or Bing + FB cultivate an army of guys that want to get rich and can control their own destiny, the output will be far more interesting
rufugee 16y ago
Bing was extremely lavish in compensation, making offers to the best hackers for $90K/year when the adjacent teams were making $75K/year offers. This is what really stood out to me. I'm in tech management these days...I pay my good developers close to $90K, and I'm no Google or Microsoft. What's wrong with this picture? Bing was created what...four years ago? Is this really a realistic salary for the best hackers?
athom 16y ago
"The report of my death was an exaggeration." -- Mark Twain I was having a look at Terabyte drives in Best Buy yesterday, and while wondering how well a model might work with Linux, I realized, now the display computers actually have internet capability, I should be able to look it up right there in the store! So, I wander over to a convenient laptop, kick it out of screensaver mode, start up the browser, and plug in the product name. Only after I hit the search button did I notice WHAT service I was using. Added bonus: Google was NOT an option. I'll believe that Bing is dead when it isn't the default search engine in the default browser on the default operating system at the default computer store.
arihant 16y ago
But what if Bing uses Microsoft's Facebook ties to bring social to search? Isn't that the root of "Google is scared by social" thing that's going on? A lot of times when things seem to be dead, they are on the edge of killing everything else.

322 points by domino 16y ago

latch 16y ago

The OP seems to attribute the "failure" of bing to common problems associated with Microsoft (in specific) and large companies (in general). With a specific point that it all started wonderfully, then got corporatized. I'm happy believing that this was the main problem. But...as an end user i don't think Bing was/is ever as as close to Google as the OP seems to think.

kami8844 16y ago
I had to do some web scraping for an application that I recently wrote and only when my app's performance started to rely on the results provided by the various search engines out there, I started to fully appreciate how good Google is. It's just no comparison; in edge cases, misspelled and unconventional searches (where it really matters) Google completely creams the competition. While Bing came closest to providing search results as accurate as Googles it still wasn't at any comparable level, so all in all I agree with your point.
exit 16y ago
why was kami8844's comment instantly flagged? it's really disgusting to see people quietly being blacklisted. --- 1 point by kami8844 0 minutes ago | link [dead] I had to do some web scraping for an application that I recently wrote and only when my app's performance started to rely on the results provided by the various search engines out there, I started to fully appreciate how good Google is. It's just no comparison; in edge cases and unconventional searches (where it really matters) Google completely creams the competition. While Bing came closest to providing search results as accurate as Googles it still wasn't at any comparable level, so all in all I agree with your point. ---
- Joakal 16y ago
  Was the reporter respected or the system assume a new reporter weight is the same as a veteran user to hide it? If so, don't give too much weight to new reporters for flagging.
- gjm11 16y ago
  I wonder whether it's an automatic consequence of having substantial negative karma. (I'm ambivalent about the stealth-blacklisting thing. It's probably the right thing to do with genuinely abusive users. It might be the right thing with people genuinely incapable of contributing much. But I've seen too many cases where someone's comments are all being auto-deaded -- invisibly to them, AIUI -- with no obvious reason why they should deserve it.)
  - jules 16y ago
    Right, the system is far too trigger happy. Instead of showing a newcomer what kind of comments are valued here and possibly gaining a valuable new contributor, the system severely punishes beginner mistakes. We can't reasonably expect that a new user knows what kind of comments are valued because on the rest of the internet such comments are perfectly acceptable. Perhaps something like Quora does would help: before you can use the site you have to do a quiz on what kind of comments are good comments.
    - pohl 16y ago
      Just for counterpoint: it would be easy for new users to figure out what a good post is by reading and paying attention to the scores they get. One gets a sense for what makes one a -4, another a mere zero, or some other a +47.
    - redthrowaway 16y ago
      "Perhaps something like Quora does would help: before you can use the site you have to do a quiz on what kind of comments are good comments." Really? Sorry, but that sounds like a terrible idea. HN is already insular enough, we don't need to start demanding newcomers pass a test before we let them comment.
      - jules 16y ago
        Let's see. There are two groups of people: people who would have passed the test and people who would not have. The people who would not have would most likely be hellbanned after their first 3 comments (and of course people are allowed to take the test as many times as they want). So you lose nothing. By using a test fewer legitimate people get hellbanned. In other words, this is only going to improve the situation. I'm not talking about a difficult test here: just a couple of questions like: Comment: LOL Is this an acceptable comment? Right now people are used to that being an acceptable comment on the rest of the internet. These people currently get hellbanned on HN because other people downvote these comments. It's not a test for testing whether the people are acceptable on HN, it's method of teaching customs and a test for whether people have read the guidelines.
- ricree 16y ago
  Looks like he's a new user that got mostly downvotes on his early comments. In isolation, I can't entirely disagree the downvotes, but it seems to me that the system ought to be more tolerant of people that screw up their first couple posts as long as they were honest contributions (as opposed to spam). Perhaps the ban should be triggered a lot more heavily on flags than downvotes up to a certain number of posts. A karma based ban that makes some sense for people that are consistently bad. But it seems to me that the current ban code doesn't give newcomers enough chance to change based on the feedback they've been given. New users don't have a buffer to fall back on if they make one or two bad posts, and ought to be given more leeway. As long as people are flagging correctly, that should take care of obvious trolls or spam.
- kami8845 16y ago
  Thanks for pointing that out, as others have written below, I'm a new user and while the system here looks pretty similiar to the one at Reddit, the type of comment that is appreciated here seems vastly different. I was kind of surprised to instantly receive 3 downvotes for my first comment that just expressed my happiness to have found this community, and while it was pretty void of content, the rules expressly state that empty comments can be OK if they are positive. I agree that the system is quite a bit too trigger-happy. Being shadowbanned is a pretty shitty spot to be in and I don't think 9 downvotes over 4 comments qualify for such harsh punishment.
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    >I don't think 9 downvotes over 4 comments qualify for such harsh punishment Personally I'd say that depends. If you have a positive comment history then no you sholdn't be banned for a small run of comments that the community finds unhelpful to the conversation. If all of your first comments are downvoted then I suggest you make a new account and wait until you have something positive to say. Note that positive doesn't mean affirming groupthink, or karma whoring (which is hard here but looks possible) but adding to the conversation. An opposing opinion well expressed often won't win a lot of upvotes but it usually gets more ups than downs.
    - dhimes 16y ago
      Part of the problem is that downvoting is used to express disagreement. We have this discussion often on HN (perhaps too often): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 Note: the following unexpectedly turned into a bit of a rant, with a dose of whining thrown in: Many of us "old-timers" think that downvoting without giving a reason is mostly bad form (the exception is for a rude or obnoxious comment). I've personally noticed an increase in this behavior. I believe that doing so decreases the user experience. I've had plenty of disagreements over the years and have almost always learned something from them (even if it just required me to do a bit of soul-searching). Posts would be painstakingly composed (one of the big complaints we had was that the post-page timed out while we were composing- so we had to result in using a separate editor to compose, then click "reply" and copy-and-paste. But now-- why bother? I've been around a while. I'm on my second (third?) career. Not a hacker extraordinaire by any means, but I'm well educated technically and have maintained my involvement with a broad array of interests (I like to learn new things). I've seen some things, and I'm willing to share- and even be challenged in my own conclusions about them. But when I make a post that the "average HN-er" (age 25, so I hear) may not think is very smart and I immediately get downvoted with no reason given, it sends a signal that HN has changed in a very dramatic way. The site is far less valuable than it used to be.
Diabeetus 16y ago
I don't know how good Bing was, but Google put a lot of work into modernizing it's website after the launch of Bing so maybe they did see it as a threat.
- levesque 16y ago
  Probably they just wanted to make sure they stayed ahead of Bing on all levels. Like Apple is doing right now with the iPad.
encoderer 16y ago
Speaking qualitatively, I disagree. I actually use them interchangeably. When I'm using IE (testing features), if I have to search, I just search from the location bar, which defaults to Bing. I feel like the results are essentially the same and I never recall having trouble finding what I'm looking for in Bing. Though I suppose one huge omission is the date filter. I use that a lot on Google and certainly miss it sometimes on Bing. Most importantly, Google was essentially stagnant for years until Bing came along. Since then they've really upped their game. They cloned Bing image search. They took the context summary in Bing that I loved from the beginning and one-upped it. And I've seen more natural answers in Google to match what Bing set to do from day one. I use and support Bing and you should too. What Bing did to Google is like what Firefox did to IE. It reminded them that they should be innovating still!

Hov 16y ago

I find it telling that he admits to moving on from Microsoft and trying "a long list of failed ideas" From the sounds of it, they had very little process in the beginning, which implies to me that they would have eventually failed to compete with Google anyway. He's crazy if he thinks Google has no process in place when shipping software.

scorpion032 16y ago

The biggest problem that comes in the way is the condescending attitude of the "grown ups". It is very important for the "management" to realize that they are actually only facilitating what is "happening" and they should let the system handle itself and get out of the way than get into and disturb the existing norm.

raganwald 16y ago
One of the most serious problems with modern "management" is that the incentives are all wrong. Imagine that I hire a programmer and pay him by the line of code. This idea has been so thoroughly debunked that it is nearly impossible to write out the consequences without sounding cliché. Yet it happens all the time: Companies promote "Architects" who are evaluated by the weight of their "architecture." The result is stultifying and demoralizing. The architect does not work to facilitate the programmer's work, he works to produce evidence of his contribution in the form of frameworks, standards, and software process. So, how are most managers evaluated? By the amount of "managing" they do, as measured by the amount of process they impose on their team. Evaluating a manager by the amount of managing they do is exactly the same thing as evaluating a programmer by the amount of code they write. And it produces results like you describe, where the manager works to produce evidence of their management in the form of processes and decisions from the top down, rather than facilitating the work actually being done. In a simplistic world, the answer would be to change the incentives and the behaviour would change itself. But as they say, "correlation does not equal causation." The incentives have to change, but so do the people. Results-oriented managers don't work in those kind of environments to begin with, and after a year or two in such a place they will already have left. You need to change the incentives and the culture and the people all together.
- JoeAltmaier 16y ago
  Middle managers are rewarded for making budget and meeting release dates. Seems good, right? So they agitate for (wait for it) maximum budget and minimum feature set. So that success is assured and their metric is optimized. Unfortunately those things are exactly contrary to company goals. Why does this happen? {opinion} Middle managers are too remote from either customers (financial goals) or top management (company goals). They're in the middle, right? With layers between them and either end. And when you try to optimize any process with too many degrees of freedom, you have too many variables and get to choose which ones to look at. So middle managers look at their own career and ignore the rest. My suggestion: line up all middle managers in the parking lot (important), stand at the end of the line, and put one bullet through all of them (optimizes cost in bullets). If my company Ever has middle managers, its time to call it quits.

raganwald 16y ago

Perhaps a bit OT, but... The post seemed to be riddled with formatting and grammar errors. This rubbed my old-school English sensibilities at first, but then I began to enjoy its rough feel. After all, it's a post about how people who worked tirelessly to bring a product to market were shipping things while the rest of Microsoft slept. The story very clearly describes a dichotomy in Microsoft's culture between process/rules/superficial quality on the one hand and relentlessly shortening the ship/fix cycle on the other. This post is not just about shortened ship/fix cycles, it is itself an example of a shortened write/fix cycle. When that struck me, the style of post suddenly "clicked:" It was as if I was reading an email that was furiously blasted out to Posterous while the author's compiler worked, and thereafter there was no time for extensive editing and proofing by a circle of reviewers. What mattered was to get the idea out and to start the conversation, editing and polish would follow later. Great stuff!

Ruudjah 16y ago
It's one of those very, very scarce texts where mild swearing adds something. 99 out of 100 times, it's just deteriorating the post quality and signs of bad writership.
- GFischer 16y ago
  Indeed. Saying "Michael fucking Burrows" made me look him up (as intended, I guess :) ) "Michael Burrows (born circa 1963) is widely known as the creator of the Burrows/Wheeler transform. He also was, with Louis Monier, one of the two main creators of AltaVista" (which I guess was the point!). He ironically now works to Google according to Wikipedia.
  - basugasubaku 16y ago
    He is also an author of the Google Bigtable (http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html) and Chubby (http://labs.google.com/papers/chubby.html http://labs.google.com/papers/chubby.html) papers. In university, we had to read one of his earlier papers, Eraser (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.22.3256 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.22.3...).

mattmanser 16y ago

The whole article seems to be back to front. As far as I knew Live search was essentially failing then they made it Bing and it's started to succeed. Am I missing something here or what? I'm no expert on the history but it seems to me that the opposite of what the author is saying actually happened!

cicero 16y ago
You have an outsider perspective, while the article was written from an insider's perspective. It appears that the technology team was at its peak when it changed from Live to Bing, and has declined since then. The success of Bing has been due to marketing, but without a sound technical team behind it, it's going to die.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  It appears that the technology team was at its peak when it changed from Live to Bing, and has declined since then. This is the take from one insider. I suspect if you were talk to someone else on the Bing team you may get a very different story.
nchlswu 16y ago
I think that's one of the objectives of this article; provide that alternate perspective. I thought that Bing was the true turning point as well, but I never gave Live Search a fair chance then, and I don't think many others did either. To me, it looks like the author saw Bing/Live Search as something truly transformational within Microsoft. Public perception was that Live was a failure. But if I understand currently, the team was easily beating internal estimates extremely fast . For one reason or another there was a team reorganization that coincided with the PowerSet acquisition and the Bing rebrand. While there was a jump in market share, the foundation of the Bing team was taken out from under them and replaced with MS status quo. Bing's death isn't a result of their success or failure as a search engine. Bing's death refers to the loss of something that could have made a difference in Microsoft, internally. The death of a team that could have done something truly great , (EDIT: as said by Cicero, when they were at their peak).

tocomment 16y ago

Bing is dead?

bartl 16y ago
Well, according to this post, everyone who was technically knowledgeable about Bing has left. That implies that there will no longer be any relevant technical progress, any more.
- cdesmar 16y ago
  Not sure this is relevant progress but 18 march bing for "HG download" gave no mercurial results (hg was assumed to be a mistyping of HD), by 24 march it was giving all mercurial results. I twittered about both. That is at least anecdotal evidence that things are progressing in some way or another.
  - mithaler 16y ago
    That's not necessarily a change in the codebase, that could be the system learning from associations in queries and results it gets over time (something I know Google does and has for years, at least).
  - code_duck 16y ago
    Unpredictability is progress?
    - cdesmar 16y ago
      Returning meaningful results is progress. Why would you want a predictably wrong answer, you must be a manager.
      - code_duck 16y ago
        Actually, you've plotted two data points here. That doesn't tell you much. How do you know it doesn't go back to showing irrelevant results on the 28th?

jeremydavid 16y ago

Just thought I'd let you know your text rendered very small on my browser, and the light grey quotes were almost unreadable.

steve-howard 16y ago
Indeed, I have no idea why bloggers are so insistent on using gray-on-white quotations.

InclinedPlane 16y ago

I don't know that Bing has "failed" yet, but I highly doubt it'll be anything other than one amongst many in the pack in 5 years. Microsoft has always been good at the pivotal turnaround. Recognizing when a key moment was on the wind, mustering together a tremendous effort, making a good number of smart decisions and putting out a solid anchor product that (re)cements their position in the industry and reinvigorates the brand in doing so. Windows 95 and Windows 7 are perfect examples. IE4 (yes really), Bing, and Windows Phone 7 are also good examples. One of the big problems with Microsoft is that its organization and its culture are extremely tied to the traditional 3-ish year ship cycle. A hugely successful diving catch every other ship cycle or so is rapidly becoming less and less feasible as a means to hang on to or acquire a market. Microsoft does not seem to get the web at a fundamental level, it doesn't seem to have the capacity to release software at a pace of yearly, monthly, or continuously. And that will ultimately be the undoing of Bing and the Windows Phone. The only way MS knows how to crank out releases faster is the deathmarch, and that is a certain route to doom. Worse yet, since Gates left MS has no real technical or managerial leadership, it's bureaucracy all the way up and down. This has been affecting the culture at Microsoft little by little, also partly coupled to the stock price having plateaued. More and more talented devs are finding that MS lacks the excitement and the reward of cutting edge development, so they are moving elsewhere. Also, without that talent around fewer good projects are pushed forward, fewer projects succeed, people become less satisfied with their jobs, etc. (think about the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" only translate the bad stuff, on a corporate level, to hundreds and then thousands of George Bailey's going away). This makes the environment that much less rewarding for everyone else who remains, so yet more people leave. And slowly but surely the creep of a more rigid and bureaucratic corporate culture and organization fills in the gaps left by the people who had the most clout in the company, causing yet more and more talent to evaporate away. It's a self-reinforcing cycle that will lead to the rapid diminution of the company and its prospects over time and the examples the article provides of the process as it happened at Bing have played out throughout the company. Nobody young with high prospects seriously considers Microsoft as a destination anymore, and increasingly the older devs are either retiring on their massive earnings from the glory days or they're just looking for somewhere else to be that's a better use of their time and talent. MS continues to make a crap-ton of money from its core products, but it will be institutionally ham-strung in responding to the threats that will steal away that revenue (such as mobile-heritage operating systems). Because those threats will grow at a rate MS is incapable of competing with.

hanifvirani 16y ago

Strange. To me, as an outsider, it looks like Bing has just started to get good enough to be considered as a threat to Google. Of course, they have a long long way to go. But it appears as a rapidly emerging product rather than a dying product.

kenjackson 16y ago
I agree. It was only in the last year that I could use Bing as my primary search engine.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

fferen 16y ago

For all the people saying X search engine is better, here's a tool to compare Google and Bing (and Yahoo) results without bias. It simply shows you three columns of results, you click on the one with the best results, and it reveals which ones came from which search engines. http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ Note: I am not affiliated with this site in any way.

danvet 16y ago
I've seen this site before and frankly I think it's rather irrelevant. Recent innovations (past years) in search are mostly spelling corrections/related topics suggestions, visual presentation of aggregated results (how many images, results from suggestions) and stuff like that. The pure ranking order delivered on a fixed search is more and more useless, the imo important part is how the search engine guides you until you've found the correct search query that delivers what you're actually looking for.
GFischer 16y ago
Hmmm, it's giving me the wrong results... it shows the results I voted from are from "Bing", but when I went to Google it showed me those results, and Bing's results where the ones marked "Yahoo". See here http://blindsearch.fejus.com/?q=21+de+setiembre+y+sarmiento&type=web http://blindsearch.fejus.com/?q=21+de+setiembre+y+sarmiento&... it would have me believe that Bing's were the better results (they weren't for this particular search). Also, when I'm logged in and using my country-specific search, Google is way, way, way better than the competition. Edit: I'll probably message the creator (parent is not affiliated with the site)

tedsbardella 16y ago

The web site he is promoting is very creepy.

dvfer 16y ago

Bing is not really providing anything more than google's service. It only shows "big company's" routine of trying to drive others out of business. Death for Bing.

parfe 16y ago
I disagree. I remembered Bing's decision engine commercials when looking for a plane ticket. Turns out that Bing is way better for flights than Google is, by far. Just try typing New York City to Los Angeles into both search engines. Bing finds what you are after and Google does not.
- kami8845 16y ago
  I prefer how Google handles that search query. If you're looking for a flight does entering 'fly' after your two destinations really hurt that much? 'to' is -more often than not - a pretty meaningless keyword, and I'm pretty sure most people don't want half of what's above the fold to be taken up by flight information if all they enter is a very general 'New York City to Los Angeles'.
  - parfe 16y ago
    It's not just the flight specific widget bing has, but the fact is consolidates several sites worth of data into a single interface. On Google you don't get a unified view of data. The ticket vendor is not important to me. It's only the flight cost and number of stopovers that matter, which google does not help with.

franklindholm 16y ago

Is this written in English?

rjhackin 16y ago

I am not sure about the death of Bing, Bing has momentum and they should take it forward and not lose ground. Competition is important to bring the best out of technology.

RyanMcGreal 16y ago

> They totally din't see Google as a threat, till it had a huge market cap. (Don't be evil, was a joke?) Does having a huge market cap automatically make a company evil?

dstein 16y ago
Not automatically. But I think it would be easy to prove there's a correlation between market cap and corruption.
- antiterra 16y ago
  If it would be easy, then perhaps you should do it. Such a conclusion would have a nice amount of academic value. I imagine there are a large number of small and/or untraded businesses with dishonest or illegal practices. Perhaps data would even show that larger market cap indicates corruption is less likely, depending on your measurement for corruption?

jdp23 16y ago

Interesting perspectives. I was there in 2006-2007 when they made the decision to throw resources at the problem and challenge Google head-on in algorithmic search. The strategy at the time was to become #2 in a duopoly by investing at a level that Yahoo! couldn't compete with, and focus on the most valuable searches (travel, shopping, etc.), and leverage Microsoft Research a lot more. From an abstract business perspective it's worked remarkably well. But if so many motivated and talented people are leaving, then there's something fundamentally flawed. And there were a lot of other much-less-expensive approaches they could have taken instead (or in addition, if they wanted to shoot for the moon) that would have also created a lot more opportunities for growth and excitement for younger engineers in particular. Ah well.

Matt_Cutts 16y ago

"They [Bing] had weekly release cycles - faster than Google back then" Hmm. I'm gonna have to disagree with that part. :)

myprasanna 16y ago
Matt, How long would you estimate, for a search changelist to hit the production at Google? I've got friends working there. Prepare to be surprised.
- hexis 16y ago
  I think you've got a bit of a surprise in store for you, too, when you find out what Matt does for a living.
  - myprasanna 16y ago
    Got it :) I still know for a fact that, it takes at-least a month on average, for a search change list to reach production. Would you disagree Matt?
    - shadowmatter 16y ago
      I'm an ex-Googler, and I disagree. Before I left the GWS team (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/29/google_web_server/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/29/google_web_server/) became a model for how frequent, stable releases should be done within the company. That's all I'll say.
      - myprasanna 16y ago
        I've just recently spoken with my friends, and I know for a fact that it atleast takes a month from point of checkin to review/test/stage/production. If you disagree, I think what you are talking about, is probably an exception and not the norm. Being secretive about release cycles is pointless stealth.

rorrr 16y ago

> Bing was extremely lavish in compensation, making offers to the best hackers for $90K/year Is this a joke?

aChrisSmith 16y ago
No. Remember the article talked about poaching students right out of college. $90k a year isn't much for an experienced developer, however right out of college (and at the time) that was 10-20k more than they could expect joining another company.
- rorrr 16y ago
  "experienced hackers" and "students right out of college" are quite different in my world view.

enjo 16y ago

This is tangential, but somehow related: My level of frustration Redmond has reached epic levels. My company spends thousands of dollars a week managing advertising campaigns on Adcenter. They have an API which has been nothing but issues, but given the breadth of our advertising base it's absolutely necessary that we use it. Today we have entered day number FIVE of an outage in which the API (at least one critical portion of it) simply errors out no matter what call you make. So for five days we've been unable to pause campaigns, change bid prices, or otherwise do anything to effectively manage our campaigns. It's nuts. This is the second major outage in the last couple of weeks. The part that KILLS me is that nobody in Redmond seems to give a damn. They announced that they had a problem two days after I brought it to their attention. They are apparently working on some sort of fix that may or may not be pushed sometime in the last three days. Meanwhile we are absolutely blowing through cash because of the things that we can't adjust. We're tens of thousands of keywords spread out over more than a thousand campaigns. We don't employ anybody to manage these by hand...

forwardslash 16y ago
I assume you're using the REST API? While they try and roll out a fix, have you tried to use the adCenter Desktop to at least somewhat manage the ads?
- AJ007 16y ago
  That might work if adcenter desktop was actually stable!
  - forwardslash 16y ago
    Unfortunately it's still technically in 'beta' so it intermittently has issues. I still use it everyday, though.
  - robryan 16y ago
    That would be of little comfort I'd imagine if you had a lot of custom stuff running through the API. At least they opened the thing up recently to add customers, that's a step in the right direction. (Although that could also be the cause of instability, they did have years to prepare for it though.)

rebelidealist 16y ago

Would you consider likealittle.com a startup? The definition of a startup is company with a limited operating history and a company is an organization aimed at making profits.

wightnoise 16y ago

The only value I ever had for Bing was their cashback shopping engine, and they've gotten rid of that. Birth and Death of Jellyfish.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jellyfish.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jellyfish.com

TheCondor 16y ago

A buddy and I were drinking months back, and for whatever reason (most likely several beers was the reason) he misinterpreted the Bing and Facebook arrangement that was made for "Facebook is buying Bing." Completely un-Microsoft, I can't see it happening but if it did.. Damn that could make things interesting. Bing is interesting, it's a great attempt. The problem is Microsoft, so long as they're running it and setting the "standard" for it, it's going to be a failure. It's not going to knock Google off their perch. It's just not. And anything less than that will be a failure. Cut that team and product free, hand it over to like a facebook? IBM went through some similar stuff, MS should be spinning stuff out, if their current phone effort fails again to live up to their hype, they should just cut that group free too, let them go and be successful. that stuff creates new industries which in turn create new opportunities for everybody, including MS. Let Bing or Bing + FB cultivate an army of guys that want to get rich and can control their own destiny, the output will be far more interesting

rufugee 16y ago

Bing was extremely lavish in compensation, making offers to the best hackers for $90K/year when the adjacent teams were making $75K/year offers. This is what really stood out to me. I'm in tech management these days...I pay my good developers close to $90K, and I'm no Google or Microsoft. What's wrong with this picture? Bing was created what...four years ago? Is this really a realistic salary for the best hackers?

athom 16y ago

"The report of my death was an exaggeration." -- Mark Twain I was having a look at Terabyte drives in Best Buy yesterday, and while wondering how well a model might work with Linux, I realized, now the display computers actually have internet capability, I should be able to look it up right there in the store! So, I wander over to a convenient laptop, kick it out of screensaver mode, start up the browser, and plug in the product name. Only after I hit the search button did I notice WHAT service I was using. Added bonus: Google was NOT an option. I'll believe that Bing is dead when it isn't the default search engine in the default browser on the default operating system at the default computer store.

arihant 16y ago

But what if Bing uses Microsoft's Facebook ties to bring social to search? Isn't that the root of "Google is scared by social" thing that's going on? A lot of times when things seem to be dead, they are on the edge of killing everything else.