Microsoft search head denies new project
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Microsoft's search and advertising head spoke said the company is taking steps to improve its search market position.
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(InfoWorld) - Word that Microsoft had a crack team of developers in Silicon Valley working on a cutting-edge search project is news to the company's head of search and advertising. "When they get it done, I hope they'll send me a link to it so I'll know about it," Satya Nadella, corporate vice president of Microsoft's search and advertising platform group, jokingly said late on Monday at the Search Marketing Expo in Seattle. He was responding to a question about a rumor making the rounds online that a team of engineers at Microsoft's Mountain View office is working on a new search engine to replace its existing one. While Nadella denied any specific effort to build a new search engine, he did say that his group, as a very young search operation compared to some other giants, would need to take risks in order to improve its position. Microsoft search is just over 3 years old and has about 10 percent of the market, he said. "We'll experiment," he said. One way that Microsoft may work to improve its search ranking is by trying to leverage its position as a content provider. The MSN portal has around 500 million unique users globally, he said. His group is trying to find ways to encourage them to use Microsoft's Live search. The MSN A-List is an example of that effort. The A-List is a page that shows top searches on Live search. In addition, the main Microsoft.com page only recently got a Live search bar, he said. Microsoft will also have to differentiate its search product from the others to get ahead, he said. Offerings like 3D maps, where he thinks Microsoft is in the lead, as well as mobile and image search could help the company gain users. Longer term, Nadella wants to experiment with and "reconceptualize" the search user interface. There's a "ton" of innovation that can be done on the user experience side, he said. In addition to innovating on new products, Nadella's group will get more scientific in researching how customers use Live search. "The crux of our problem is how do we get existing searchers to use it more," he said. To figure out how to do that, he wants to have more data about things like abandonment rates. Microsoft has an uphill battle to fight as it competes against current search leaders. Microsoft's Live search trails far behind Google, which has about half of the search market share. Yahoo, the second largest search provider, had nearly 27 percent share in April, according to ComScore Networks.
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Microsoft's top legal advisor in Europe has urged the European Commission not to insist that key security features be stripped from its new Windows Vista operating system, amid an ongoing dispute.
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Software giant hopes to challenge Google with new search technology.
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PC Magazine - Microsoft's Office team downplayed the threat from Google's Web-based word processing and spreadsheet applications, saying they are unlikely to appeal to corporate customers.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft will make changes to its desktop search program following aÂ complaint to the U.S. Department of JusticeÂ (DOJ) by Google. Google suggested in a white paper submitted to the DOJ earlier this year that Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system puts other search software companies at a disadvantage, making it difficult for users to utilize non-Microsoft desktop-search software. Microsoft has reached an agreement with the DOJ to make it easier for end users to employ desktop search programs made by rival software developers, The Wall Street Journal reported. Microsoft will also provide more documentation and information to developers about how to make those search programs run smoothly, it said. The changes will be included in Microsoft's firstÂ Vista update, called Service Pack 1, slated to be released later this year, the report said. California Attorney General Jerry Brown said Microsoft had agreed to make the "significant changes" in Vista operating system to stay in compliance with a U.S. court agreement in Microsoft's antitrust case. Brown's office intervened in the wake of reports that Microsoft's new operating system included a desktop search function called "Instant Search" that violated terms of its agreement to open its products to more competition. Google, which offers the most popular search engine on the Internet, said "Instant Search" is a "Microsoft middleware product," which is subject to the federal agreement in the antitrust case. The State of California contended that Vistaâs desktop search feature is a functionality that did not exist in prior Windows operating systems and is therefore covered under the agreement. Brown said Microsoft will provide users and computer manufacturers, such as Hewlett-Packard and Dell, with greater flexibility to choose and access competing desktop search products. The agreement was included in a joint status report that was filed Wednesday with federal District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in Washington, D.C., who presided over the 2002 agreement in the case. "This agreement -- while not perfect -- is a positive step towards greater competition in the software industry," said Brown. "It will enhance the ability of consumers to select the desktop search tool of their choice." "Microsoft believes that Google's complaint is without merit," Microsoft's lawyers wrote in the status report. "Nevertheless, Microsoft worked with the Plaintiffs in a spirit of cooperation to resolve any issues the complaint may raise." Google said the search changes are welcome but more needs to be done. "Microsoft's current approach to Vista desktop search clearly violates the consent decree and limits consumer choice," said David Drummond, Google's senior vice president and chief legal officer. "These remedies are a step in the right direction, but they should be improved further to give consumers greater access to alternate desktop search providers." Microsoft was found to be operating an illegal monopoly in software by another U.S. District Judge in Washington. Microsoft entered into a settlement agreement with the federal government and attorneys general for several U.S. states to abide by certain rules to allow more competition. Microsoft had originally denied that its own desktop search interfered with non-Microsoft indexing software, noting that its search indexing could be turned off, although with some difficulty. The Redmond company also seemed to have the DOJ, its former antitrust foe, on its side: Thomas O. Barnett, now the DOJ's top-ranking antitrust official,Â recommended that the DOJ and state attorneys general rejectÂ Google's complaint, according to a New York Times report earlier this month. As part of the desktop search agreement, software vendors will be able to register their products as alternatives for the Vista search. The default search selected by the computer user or OEM will launch whenever Vista launches a search result window, and the default search will have space in Vista's start menu. Microsoft will also tell software vendors and OEMs that the desktop search index in Vista is designed to run in the background and "cede precedence over computing resources to any other software product, including third-party search products," the DOJ said in its portion of the status report. "Microsoft will emphasize that there is no technical reason why OEMs and end-users cannot, if they choose to, install additional desktop search products on their systems." The plaintiffs in the case, including 17 states that sued Microsoft for antitrust, are "collectively satisfied that this agreement will resolve any issues" in the Google complaint, the DOJ said. Elsewhere in the status report, the DOJ said a technical committee overseeing Microsoft's compliance has hired two consulting firms to check Microsoft's procedures for identifying communications protocols that it is required to disclose to independent software vendors who want to make their products interoperable with Microsoft's. In March, Microsoft and the plaintiffs reached an agreement to address concerns over the belated discovery of protocols that plaintiffs believed needed to be disclosed. The technical committee will extend a royalty-free program for software vendors to receive the protocols, the DOJ said. The royalty-free program will continue 18 months after the date the committee decides the protocol documentation is substantially complete, and the technical committee can extend the program if it believe Microsoft isn't making progress on the documentation, the DOJ said. But Microsoft is on schedule with a plan to fix technical documentation used by other software vendors, the DOJ said. Errors in the technical documentation have prompted repeated complaints from the antitrust plaintiffs in recent months, but the DOJ said Microsoft has been able "to keep up with the flow of new technical documentation issues." This story was updated on June 20, 2007
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This week, Martin Taylor, Microsoft&#39;s general manager for platform strategy, isn&#39;t touting any new Microsoft-funded studies aimed to demonstrate that Microsoft&#39;s total-cost-of-ownership numbers beat those of its Linux competitors.
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Google Inc. CEO Eric Schmidt on Wednesday told industry analysts the online search engine leader is unlikely to create its own Web browser, even though the company remains worried about being slighted by the next version of Microsoft Corp.&#039;s Internet Explorer.
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A federal judge recently denied Google's request for dismissal of American Airlines' suit.
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New platform chief, Ashim Pal, says software giant has been on the defensive against Linux and other rivals.
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Reports of a secret Silicon Valley search engine project are news to the company's head of search and advertising.
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Ziff Davis - The leading search vendors discuss technology strategies, marketing plans, and business models for searching enterprise and personal information during a panel at the Harvard Business School's Cyberposium, and a Microsoft executive says the software giant has no plans to integrate desktop search into Windows.
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Microsoft says the scripting platform, called Shell, is not final.
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(InfoWorld) - Google has complained to federal antitrust officials that the search tool in Microsoft'sÂ Windows VistaÂ Â discourages customers from using its own search utility, the company confirmed Sunday. Stories posted to the Web sites of The New York Times (registration required)Â and theÂ Seattle Post-IntelligencerÂ SaturdayÂ first revealedÂ that Google's complaint centered on Vista's built-in desktop search software, dubbed Instant Search. According to both newspapers, Google accused Microsoft of designing Vista to discourage users from running its indexing and search software. On Sunday, Google spokesman Ricardo Reyes confirmed the charge. "Microsoft's current approach with Vista desktop search violates its agreement with the government and hurts consumers." he said in an e-mail to Computerworld. "The search boxes built throughout Vista are hard-wired to Microsoft's own desktop search product, with no way for users to choose an alternate provider from these visible search access points. Likewise, Vista makes it impractical to turn off Microsoft's search index." According to postings on Microsoft's support forums, the only way to completely disable Vista's search is to stop the Windows Search service in the Microsoft Management Console. Microsoft disputed Google's charges. "We've been working with state and federal antitrust officials for the past two years to ensure that there are no problems with any of the features in Windows Vista," said company spokesman Jack Evans. "These desktop search issues were reviewed at length with regulators prior to the release of Windows Vista and resulted in more than a dozen changes at their request." Even so, Microsoft will consider more changes to Vista, Evans added. "While we donât believe there are any compliance concerns with desktop search, we are committed to going the extra mile to resolve this issue, so long as the changes Google is requesting do nothing to undermine the privacy and security of computer users." During aÂ March 2007 hearingÂ conducted by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the federal judge who oversees the 2002 Microsoft consent decree, the government's status report noted that a complaint had been filed, but did not identify the company. "At the last status conference, plaintiffs reported that they had just received a middleware-related complaint," theÂ status reportÂ read. "Since then, plaintiffs have been investigating this complaint, including obtaining significant additional information from Microsoft and the complainant." Google had previously raised concerns about search in Microsoft'sÂ Internet Explorer 7Â browser with federal officials. In May 2006, however,Â federal officials rebuffed Google, saying that IE 7 users could easily switch search providers and that computer makers could set the default search engine in IE 7 before shipping systems. Google has also filed similar complaints over search in both IE 7 and Vista with the European Union's antitrust commission. Those complaints have not been settled. According to The New York Times, the U.S. Department of Justice refused to pursue the Google complaint, andÂ Thomas Barnett,Â the assistant U.S. attorney general for antitrust, sent a memo to numerous state attorneys general in May asking them to also reject the complaint. Prosecutors in several of those states, however, have reportedly decided to investigate the Google concerns whether the federal government goes along or not, a decision that has Barnett reconsidering the agency's position. E-mails and phone calls asking several of the states involved with the 2004 Microsoft settlement to comment were not returned Sunday. Barnett's division will present its next report on Microsoft's progress in meeting the 2002 settlement to Kollar-Kotelly in a hearing scheduled for June 26. Â
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Blog: Microsoft's proposed changes to search functions in Windows Vista, per a pact last week with regulators, don't go far enough to promote "user choice," search giant tells antitrust judge in new filing.
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Microsoft refuses to comment on alleged addition of heatsinks to repaired Xbox 360 units in Europe and other hardware flaws.
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One of the two new heads of Microsoft  Corp.'s  Office software team downplayed the threat  from Google Inc.'s  Web-based word processing and  spreadsheet applications, saying they are unlikely to appeal to  corporate customers.