Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Watch Out For Steve Ballmer

en: Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. Camera: N...Image via WikipediaStepping into Bill Gates' shoes was going to be a tough act to follow for anybody. It just was not possible. Bill Gates ruled the industry for a decade and a half. 1995 was the high point. Windows was the only game in town. And then the guy went into philanthropy where he has been as amazing as he was in software. It has been a second career to him.

Microsoft pretty much missed out the smartphone and tablet trains. But then competing with Steve Jobs is as hard as succeeding Bill Gates. Steve Ballmer has had to do both and I feel for the guy. He was an Economics major at college. And there is a cultural bias against fat, bald people. So people end up thinking he is less smart than he actually is. And he is a non coder in a coding business.

There is this story from the mid 1990s. Ballmer returned back to Redmond from one of his trips visiting with customers. And he got a group of his engineers together and said, "I don't know what TCP/IP is, I don't want to know what TCP/IP is. Just make the pain go away." Everywhere he had gone people had been talking about TCP/IP.

Could Skype Be Microsoft's YouTube?

The Skype purchase might still go down the tube, and we will know in a year or less. On the other hand this might be Ballmer's way to finally "get" smartphones and tablets.

And bringing Facebook integration to Bing is a super smart move. Social is the next frontier of search and Mark Zuckerberg still has memories of Google wanting to buy or bury him early on.
ReadWriteWeb: Bing Debuts Social Search with New Facebook Integration: Microsoft's search engine is about to tie its search results to the Facebook social graph in a move that will come as a blow to Google and its +1 initiative. Where Bing will be able to take existing "likes" from friends and integrate them into search, Google +1 has to be added from within search results before someone even clicks on a page. Google's biggest rivals are teaming up to try and make the Mountain View giant irrelevant in the future of social search...... there will be a new Bing Bar with a "universal like button," the first of its kind. Users will now be able to like any page on the Web from anywhere, regardless if that site has a like button installed or not...... Bing search results will now show "liked results, answers and sites" by showing contents that friends have liked. It will also show personalized results by surfacing content that friends have liked from "deep within" search results to the top page. Around 33% of users click on the top link of search results with click-through results dropping precipitously going down the page and to subsequent pages. So, if your friend liked something that was buried on page 89 of the search results, Bing will in theory bring it to the front page...... Bing also apparently will have the ability to crawl Facebook Pages for what brands and companies are posting online. ..... Bing can crawl profiles too. ..... "Now when people search for a specific person, Bing provides a more in-depth bio snapshot, such as location, education and employment details, to help them find the person they're looking for more quickly." ..... Google cannot do this because Facebook does not allow it. ...... Bing gets to integrate Facebook basically as much as it wants. ...... Other features include "shared shopping lists" and flight planners that help friends share ticketing information to look for the best deal. It will also help you find friends in different cities when you are traveling with a function called "friends who live here."
The Twins Were Rowing Boats
Facebook Could Do Well In Search

For the first time Google has competition in search, and the credit goes to Mark Zuckerberg. Nixon went to China. Roosevelt met Stalin.
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