Absolutely. There's a real culture problem at Microsoft that is hostile to search. I think its absolutely fair to say that Microsoft has treated search as an af

Absolutely. There's a real culture problem at Microsoft that is hostile to search. I think its absolutely fair to say that Microsoft has treated search as an afterthought in their products, and it shows. I recently saw Microsoft's Mike Gannotti speak about building Sharepoint portals for large organizations, and he said "if a user has to search you have failed them." The argument was that if a proper hierarchical navigation was in place a user should never have to search. To me that's heresy, and I wasn't shy about saying so. The retort was that I saw search as a panacea, or worse as an excuse to be lazy about information architecture. Of course neither is true. I believe great IA begets great search and that both are important and worth getting right. So I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm hoping Bing can work on both fronts, by applying taxonomy to unstructured information when it makes sense and staying out of the way the rest of the time. With the wealth of talent at Microsoft I think they are capable of building a great search engine, but only if they can really see search as more than an ad platform.