February 5th, 2010

Microsoft to phase out its enterprise search offerings for Linux and Unix

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:09 pm

Categories: Advertising, Corporate strategy, Office, Search, SharePoint Server

Tags: Enterprise Search, Microsoft Corp., Linux, Cloud Computing, Search, UNIX, Operating Systems, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft is going to be phasing out support for Unix and Linux platforms for its FAST enterprise search products as of their next release (some time after 2010).

Microsoft shared that information, as well as other news about its near- and longer-term search plans as part of its latest update to its enterprise-search roadmap, which it made public on February 4. (Strangely, that blog post about ending support for Linux and Unix from FAST CTO Bjørn Olstad is entitled “Innovation on Linux and Unix.”)  Via a new post on the Microsoft Enterprise Search team blog, company officials detailed what customers can expect this year and beyond. From that post:

• There are two standalone search products based on the technology Microsoft acquired in 2008 when it purchased FAST Search and Transfer for $1.23 billion. These products are due out in the first half of calendar 2010. These are FAST Search for Internet Sites and FAST Search for Internal Applications. As it indicated a year ago, Microsoft also is going to be offering two versions of SharePoint for Internet Sites (Enterprise and Standard) in the first half of this year. The Enterprise version will include rights to use FAST Search outside the firewall.
• FAST Search for Internet Sites includes the FAST Enterprise Search Platform (ESP) 5.3 core and includes content-transformation services, which are tools for processing structured and unstructured information, and Interaction Management Services (a new framework for building interactive user interfaces). This product will be licensable using a server-only model.
• FAST Search for Internal Applications includes the same ESP 5.3 search core which is licensable via a new Server/Client Access License (CAL) model.
• These two new FAST products will be the last release to include a serch core that runs on Linux and Unix. What does that mean for FAST users who have been running on those non-Microsoft operating systems, in terms of support? According to the blog post: “Microsoft is committed to supporting ESP 5.3—our multi-OS search core—for 10 years as per our support policy. Non-Windows customers who want to remain on the ESP 5.3 core can take advantage of new Windows-only innovations by using a mixed-platform architecture. Microsoft is also introducing a Customer Upgrade Program to help customers evaluate hosted solutions and/or a Windows-based deployment and remains fully committed to interoperability with non-Windows systems on both the front- and back-end.”
• Microsoft also is discontinuing FAST AdMomentum, “a search-based advertising solution,” company officials said.

In other, non-enterprise-focused search news, Microsoft announced on Februrary 5 that it had extended its search partnership with Facebook, but that Facebook would be taking over its own advertising business, a piece of which Microsoft had managed previously.

January 22nd, 2010

Microsoft: Developing Windows Phone apps and games on the Mix 2010 agenda

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 8:57 am

Categories: Channel, Corporate strategy, Google, Legal, Mobile services ("Pink"/"Rouge"), Search, Silverlight (wpf/e), Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii"), Windows 7, Windows Live, Windows Mobile, Xbox, Yahoo

Tags: Game, Phone, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Mobile, Microsoft Corp., Experience Pack, EC, Microsoft Windows, Mobile Operating Systems, Operating Systems

Windows Mobile news and rumors dominated a lot of the Microsoft headlines this week, but that wasn’t all that was happening in Redmond-related circles. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the stories that I didn’t get to:

Mobile dev is back on the Mix agenda: The folks running the Microsoft Mix 2010 conference decided after pulling a placeholder note announcing that Windows Mobile content would be on the show agenda, to reinstate the placeholder. They also added a new tidbit to it, claiming that Microsoft officials would be discussing both app and game development for next-generation Windows Phones at the show. Interesting they didn’t say Windows Mobile 6.6 or 7.0 (or Pink)…

That leaves the door open for a variety of potential topics, including how Microsoft plans to add mobile-dev support to Visual Studio 2010 (the Softies removed mobile-dev support from the VS 2010 betas, as I noted previously), as well as exactly what Silverlight on Windows Mobile 7 will enable developers to do.

Windows Mobile devs complain about not getting paid: As Ars Technica reported, some Windows Mobile developers are none too happy that they aren’t getting their expected 70 percent cut of sales from Windows Marketplace for Mobile apps. Microsoft officials are attributing some of the complaints to lack of clarity about when and how developers will get paid. Still, Microsoft doesn’t need any more Windows Mobile black eyes, especially with the Mobile World Congress show right around the corner.

Microsoft releases a Windows Experience Pack: This isn’t another Ultimate Extra kind of thing (although if there were a Windows 7 Ultimate Extra program — not that I’m advocating for one — the new Experience Pack freebies would likely be in it. The Experience Pack is a free add-on for Windows 7 and Windows Live Essentials that allows users to customize avatars and backgrounds.

EU antitrust regulators are seeking comments on the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership: Reuters reporters have seen a 38-question document that the EC is circulating in Europe that is asks “Will the merger make Microsoft a better competitor to Google?” To be clear: The Microsoft-Yahoo arrangement is not a merger; it’s a partnership unveiled in the summer of 2009, via which Bing becomes Yahoo’s primary search engine across various properties and Yahoo execs sell ads on Microsoft sites. The EC is accepting feedback through January 29, and has given itself a deadline of February 19 to clear or bar the deal. (That date can be extended, however.)

Microsoft is suing Tivo (on behalf of AT&T): The issue is DVR patents that may or may not infringe on technology used by  Microsoft in its Mediaroom IPTV offering. The show-down results from a lawsuit filed by TiVo against AT&T last year in federal court in Texas over the telecom company’s U-Verse system, an IPTV service built on top of Microsoft’s Mediaroom technology, according to TechFlash, which has the posted the full text of the lawsuit.

Bing: Now indexing more recipe sites near you. Microsoft’s search engine is indexing more food/cooking sites and making queries about what to make with particular ingredients more easily discoverable and clearly displayed. Now, if you enter ingredients, such as “scallops” or “dried cherries” into the Bing engine, one of the results categories on the left pane is a collection of recipes using those ingredients.

January 15th, 2010

ComScore: Bing market share continues to creep upward

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:13 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Google, Internet Explorer, Search, Security

Tags: ComScore Networks Inc., Microsoft Corp., Hacking, Security, Web Browsers, Search, Viruses And Worms, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

The comScore December market share numbers for U.S. search share are out, and Bing is continuing its slow, upward spiral.

Bing’s share is now at 10.7 percent, up from 10.3 percent in November, comScore said. Yahoo is down — to 17.3 percent in December, from 17.5 percent in November. And Google is holding its own, at 65.7 percent in December, compared to 65.6 in November.

Microsoft is continuing its push to use whatever means necessary to grow its search share. In January, company officials announced a deal with Microsoft via which HP will be making Bing the default search engine on most of its PCs. Microsoft struck a similar default-engine deal with Verizon recently, as well, also for an unspecified amount.

In search-related news this week, Microsoft officials said the company won’t be pulling out of China, unlike rival Google, which is threatening to do so because of cyberattacks. (Those attacks have been linked to  a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer, but didn’t affect Microsoft, officials said earlier this week.)

There’s still been no regulatory clearance on the Microsoft-Yahoo plan via which Microsoft will end up providing search results for many of Yahoo’s Web properties. If and when that clearance happens, Microsoft’s share will see a more significant upward bump, but with Bing’s current gains coming as a result of Yahoo’s losses, maybe less of a bump than Microsoft originally hoped.

January 12th, 2010

Microsoft adds new health-search capabilities to Bing

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 11:24 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Google, Search, Windows Live, Yahoo

Tags: Health Care, Microsoft Corp., Bing Community, Vertical Industries, Healthcare, Benefits, Human Resources, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft has “turned on” enhancements to its health search capabilities that are built into its Bing search engine, according to a January 12 blog post on the Bing Community site.

“We’re providing more content from new partners and augmenting instant answers with hard-to-discover data that helps users get more out of their health search experience, both on- and off-line,” blogged Alain Rappaport, Microsoft’s General Manager of Health Search.

Among the new enhancements is the presentation of a “smart summary” related to a user’s query. Bing analyzes related tops from an index of medical sources and extracts related data automatically, according to Rappaport. He cited as an example a query on “Type 2 diabetes,” noting that it would return related conditions, such as obesity; medications that would be important to know about (like insulin); and a list of U.S. medical centers active in research in that field.

The health enhancements to Bing also include the presentation of “instant answers” as part of user queries. If a user clicks on a medical center in the aforementioned example, s/he would see patient ratings for hospitals, as well as other nearby facilities and points of interest. Medications also would get the instant-answers treatment. Medications also get related instant answers. For a particular medication, a searcher would see related medications and possible side effects, according to the blog post. Microsoft also has broadened the index of sources it is searching in health to include new content from previously omitted providers, Rappaport said.

I’m thinking these Bing health enhancements are part of the long and winding Bing 2.0 release, which began in November 2009. But they might be some of the smaller, more incremental enhancements that Microsoft officials have promised to deliver between big-bang Bing releases.

Health is one of a handful of areas on which Microsoft is focusing on with its Bing work. (Others include celebrity news, shopping, and travel, with particular focus on what’s interesting to those in the Bing sweet spot: 18-34 year olds.) Microsoft has integrated health search information and results into its main Bing engine, rather than offering it as a separate service, as it did originally, when it was known as Live Search Health, the front-end to Microsoft’s HealthVault medical-records service.

December 21st, 2009

Microsoft CEO Ballmer to be bounced in 2010? No way

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 7:46 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Google, Search, Windows Mobile, Windows client, Yahoo, Zune

Tags: Newsweek, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft Corp., Corporate Governance, Corporate Law, Microsoft Windows 7, Podcasts, Microsoft Windows, Business Structures, Financial Accounting

I don’t make a habit of commenting on other pundits’ prediction lists. After all, a prediction is just a person’s opinion, and who knows what might happen in a year or 10….

But I am going to make an exception and call out one of Newsweek’s 10 Tech Predictions because I am 99.999 percent sure it’s out and out wrong. Newsweek claims Microsoft will oust CEO Steve Ballmer in 2010, the year of his tenth anniversary as Microsoft CEO.

Newsweek lists a number of valid criticisms about Microsoft: Its late-to-the-party arrival on search and MP3 players; its tanking Windows Mobile marketshare; the Vista “fiasco.” And yes, Ballmer was the top dog during all of these debacles. Newsweek claims “investors must be getting restless” and will soon will “be calling for a shakeup.” (As readers aof this blog know, there already are a number of very vocal Ballmer critics, including a number of you, who’ve been agitating for a shake-up for a while now.)

But a Ballmer ouster in 2010? That’s click-bait, pure and simple. Ballmer has said he intends to stay on as CEO for close to another decade. The Microsoft board, headed by Ballmer buddy Bill Gates, would have to fire him to get rid of him. And who would the board put in place? The in-house choices aren’t very appealing (as my podcasting partner in crime Gavin Clarke and I recently noted during our year-end Microbite episode). And Microsoft is notorious for being an unwelcoming and hostile place for outsiders to succeed.

Lots of shareholders — including many Microsoft employees — have been unhappy with senior leadership for the past few years, especially because of Microsoft’s stagnant stock price. But Ballmer took some steps in 2009 (axing 5,000+ employees, trimming travel budgets and reining in other costs) that Wall Street liked. Windows 7 has been well-received by users and company watchers. And Ballmer escaped making one of the biggest mistakes of his career by not buying Yahoo, and instead convincing that company to sign on for a partnership, which if approved by antitrust authorities, will get Microsoft what it wanted without the Redmondians having to pay $50-odd billion.

I’m not defending Ballmer out of favoritism. I haven’t been allowed to interview SteveB for more than 10 years. (”He’s a busy guy,” I hear, as each request I make is denied, and he’s shuffled off to talk to the same group of folks for the umpteenth time.)

I do think Ballmer is blamed for many decisions that were put in place by Gates. As more and more Friends of Bill are pushed out and/or move on — replaced by Friends of Steve — we’ll see a different Microsoft emerge. The coming decade will have SteveB’s stamp on it more than the previous one did. And, for better or for worse, that will mean a Microsoft that’s more driven by MBAs than geeks.

What’s your take? Is Ballmer on his way out? Should he be?

Anyone come to mind who would make a better Microsoft CEO than Ballmer? Softie or not… who would be good at steering the good ship Redmond through the next set of challenges?

December 18th, 2009

Microsoft already working on fixes for Bing for the iPhone

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 6:16 am

Categories: Apple, Corporate strategy, Search, Windows Mobile

Tags: Apple iPhone, Microsoft Corp., Bing Community, Smart Phones, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Mary Jo Foley

Two days after the release of Bing for the iPhone via Apple’s app store, Microsoft already is working on several fixes for it.

According to a December 17 post on the Bing Community blog, Microsoft is developing fixes and planning to extend support for its search app in three areas:

• No search results found outside the U.S. Bing is currently fully supported only on iPhones for the U.S. “At this time international availability has been suspended,” according to the blog post. Support and availability of Bing on the iPhone will be coming for other regions in “future versions” of Bing for the iPhone, Microsoft said, but isn’t offering a timetable. In the interim, Microsoft is advising international users to change their region format to ‘United States’ if they want to use Bing on their iPhones now.
• Voice search not working outside the U.S. Currently, using voice search anywhere but in the U.S. crashes Bing on the iPhone as a result of the region the phone is set to. Microsoft is working on a fix and plans to update the Bing iPhone app in the next few days with it. “People will get the update automatically – you won’t have to update or reinstall the app,” according to the Bing blog post. “If you are encountering this issue you can temporarily work around it by going to Settings > General > International and change your Region Format to ‘United States,’ the team is advising.
• No official support for first-generation iPod Touch. The Bing app currently supports second-generation iPod Touch devices, but Microsoft is in the midst of testing first=generation ones now and plans to announce support “as soon as testing is complete.”

If you want to see what Bing on the iPhone looks like, you can check out this screen shot gallery from my blogging colleague Ryan Naraine.

I’ve seen some tweets and heard from some Windows Mobile users that they consider Bing on the iPhone to be better than Bing on Windows Mobile phones. If you’re one of these users, have any specifics to share about what you’d like Microsoft to fix/add to the WinMo version to make it comparable to the iPhone app?

December 15th, 2009

Microsoft releases Bing iPhone app

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 7:09 pm

Categories: Apple, Channel, Corporate strategy, OEMs, Search, Windows Mobile

Tags: Apple iPhone, Microsoft Corp., App, Bing, Bing App, Smart Phones, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Mary Jo Foley

As its officials have been hinting and promising for a while now, Microsoft announced it has developed a version of its Bing search app for the iPhone.

The new Bing app is available on the iPhone app store as of tonight (December 15).

Microsoft already offers Bing on a number of mobile phones, and has a five-year deal with Verizon to provide Bing on a number of phones available to Verizon Wireless customers. A mobile version of Bing already is available for Windows Mobile, Blackberry, BREW and Sidekick devices on Verizon.

In other Bing news, Microsoft has finally hit the 10 percent market share mark with Bing, according to the November U.S. search share data from comScore. Bing’s growth is continuing to come at the expense of Yahoo, not Google.

Update: To those wondering why Microsoft would deliver a version of Bing for the iPhone — and not decide to make it a WinMo app only, in an attempt to keep more users in the Windows Mobile/Windows Phone fold — don’t forget Microsoft isn’t really one big company. It’s six or seven different companies, loosely joined, with each business unit doing whatever it takes to build market share and profits for itself. And the iPhone is gaining share while Windows Mobile is … not.

Update 2: In other Web 2.0 app news, Microsoft is making its Twitter application for its Zune HD available on December 16, according to company officials (via Twitter). So now you’ll be able to Tweet from your Zune, as Microsoft said you’d be able to do earlier this year. I’d guess the promised Facebook app for Zune HD isn’t far behind.

Update 3: Here’s a gallery of screen shots of Bing on the iPhone, from my iPhone-toting colleague Ryan Naraine.

December 8th, 2009

How Microsoft stacks up against Google's latest search and mobile wares

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 7:35 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Google, Search, Speech, Telecommunications, VOIP, Windows Mobile, Yahoo

Tags: Google Inc., Mobile, Twitter Inc., Microsoft Corp., Goggles, Microsoft Tag Technology, Search, Mary Jo Foley

Hoping (unsuccessfully so) to head off the glowing press Google was bound to get this week for its “future of search” preview, Microsoft showed off some of its latest enhancements to Bing last week. But on December 7 — the day of Google debuted its latest advances — the Softies had nothing to say about how its own offerings stacked up against Google’s new visual- and real-time search prototypes.

I thought that the Bing team might want to weigh in, given Microsoft showed off bits of its own visual search and Bing-Twitter integration capabilities since earlier this fall. Wouldn’t it be useful to offer information on how your own offerings compare, especially since many of the press and analysts covering Google’s search event didn’t seem to know or care that Microsoft already had demonstrated these technologies? But all I could get from the Bing team was this statement, delivered via a spokesperson:

“We’re not surprised to see Google joining us in launching a real-time search feature.  This is a new and exciting space and we look forward to ongoing competition and product innovation.”

Fortunately, Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb did a nice job in comparing and contrasting the real-time search offerings from Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. In a post entitled, “Google is Beating Bing & Yahoo Again, Now In Real-Time Search,” Kirkpatrick notes that Microsoft’s real-time search results are so far limited to Twitter with little pruning of “low-value” retweets. “Twitter, is of course just a small part of the real-time Web,” he notes.

More of his analysis of Bing’s real-time search capability:

“Bing’s ‘real-time search’ comes in the form of a special page for Twitter results. On that page you see a tag cloud of popular terms on Twitter, links shared regarding those terms and a few recent tweets in which each link appeared. It’s not very visually appealing. In fact, it’s downright ugly. It’s also not integrated extensively into the main Bing site.”

Bing fared better than Yahoo Search on the real-time comparative front, in Kirkpatrick’s view. He called Yahoo MIA in the space, with next-to-no Twitter or any other kind of real-time search integration.

Microsoft didn’t even mention visual search when I asked Bing execs’ response to Google’s “Goggles” preview. Goggles allows users to take photos of things like  business cards, bottle labels, book covers, landmarks and buildings on their mobile phones and receive back information about those objects on their phones. Microsoft’s Visual Search is not designed (from what I can tell) for mobile phones; it’s meant to allow users to scroll through images of world leaders, dog breeds, laptops and other select categories to help them narrow their search results.

Being someone who prefers searching with words to pictures, I haven’t found a use for Microsoft’s Visual Search prototype so far. But Goggles? If it did nothing more than allow me to scan business cards and enter them automatically into my contact list, I’d be sold. (The fact it also provides wine information/ratings from labels is an extra bonus!)

On to tagging — where the Redmondians, to their credit, weren’t simply clamming up.

Read the rest of this entry »

December 2nd, 2009

Microsoft sells off part of its FAST enterprise-search acquisition

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 2:13 pm

Categories: Corporate strategy, Search, SharePoint Server

Tags: Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft has sold off two units of Fast Search and Transfer, the Norweigian enterprise search company it bought in 2008 for $1.23 billion, to Rocket Software.

Microsoft isn’t saying how much it received for the sale of Fast’s Folio and NXT units, both of which facilitate the management online content. In fact, the Redmondians are saying very little at all about the sale, announced on December 2.

There is a frequently asked questions (FAQ) document about the sale on Rocket’s Web site. That document says that Microsoft decided to sell the two assets to Rocket “to provide ongoing support and services to partners and customers who are using these products.”

Rocket, according to the FAQ, Rocket is a 750-employee enterprise-infrastructure software vendor, headquartered in Newton, Mass., that has a “long history of acquiring strong product lines.” Rocket is taking over sales and support for the Folio and NXT products.

According to the press release announcing the sale, Folio, founded in 1987, was subsequently owned by Mead Data Central (the Lexis/Nexis people), Open Market and NextPage before its technology was acquired by Fast in 2004.

Microsoft officials said earlier this year they plan to integrate Fast search with SharePoint Server 2010. Fast’s technology soups up the enterprise search capabilities that are part of SharePoint Server. Fast adds more sophisticated user-interface elements, like thumbnail and preview views; cluster support and more compute-intensive tasks like entity abstraction and the creation of relationships between concepts. In the longer term, Microsoft’s goal is to make the Fast ESP technology the underlying kernel for all other enterprise products at Microsoft that incorporate search technology.

Update: Microsoft provided me with a statement about the deal via a corporate spokesperson. (Seeing the “December 3″ reference in this statement makes me wonder whether this announcement went out a day earlier than the Softies expected):

“On December 3rd, Microsoft transitioned its Folio and NXT products, services, and support over from FAST to Rocket Software. These products relate to CD Publishing and are non-core to the Microsoft SharePoint business. Transitioning these assets to Rocket Software for ongoing support and services will help partners and customers who are using these products continue to be successful with their investments in those products. Microsoft remains fully committed to enterprise search and looks forward to delivering SharePoint 2010 to its customers in June. “

December 2nd, 2009

Microsoft demonstrates more Bing 2.0 features and shares new user stats

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:05 pm

Categories: Corporate strategy, Google, Search, Web 2.0, Windows Mobile

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Bing Mobile Search, Search, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft sent a bunch of its top search execs to San Francisco on December 2 to show off more of what’s part of the Bing 2.0 fall refresh of the company’s search engine.

Microsoft announced the Bing fall refresh on November 11 and said to expect the new features to be rolled out over the coming weeks. To be clear, Microsoft doesn’t like to call these Bing 2.0, but that’s what employees at the company dubbed this update earlier this summer; Microsoft officials prefer to call these features examples of the “continuous improvements and updates” to Bing.

According to reports of folks in the San Francisco audience, Microsoft execs demonstrated a number of new visual-search add-ons, the new Bing Mobile search client and Silverlight-powered Bing maps. They also showed off “entity cards” and “task pages,” two more ways Microsoft is attempting to differentiate Bing from Google, presentation-wise, and to make searches more relevant.

Microsoft officials told attendees that Bing’s greatest growth is coming from the 18-24 and 25-34 age groups, to whom videos, shopping and image search are all important. Microsoft execs told event attendees that 50 percent of time in search engines is spent on sessions that are longer than 30 minutes and 60 percent of sessions include four queries or more. (I’d posit the length and number of queries could be related to the difficulty of finding the information being searched for, but that didn’t seem to come up in today’s remarks.)

Microsoft’s own internal survey found these to be the most popular queries from Bing searchers:

Given these stats, it’s not surprising that Microsoft is focusing on optimizing around visual search, video search and local mobile searches (and less so on general informational queries).

So what, exactly, did Microsoft show today? Microsoft provided more details via a Bing blog post and e-mail follow-up from a spokesperson. On the short list:

* The beta version Bing Maps that uses Silverlight and Photosynth imagery, available today. There’s also Twitter Maps “for real-time updates by area and Local Lens featuring hyperlocal, neighborhood content.”

* A new Bing Windows Mobile app that includes improved auto-locate and voice search that is due to be rolled out over the next few days.

* A new Bing toolbar “which flags online content and alerts you when you’re about to make a purchase that qualifies for Bing cashback.”

* A social-network Visual Search capability that integrates Facebook and Twitter. It’s “coming soon,” according to Microsoft. (Microsoft announced and began rolling out Visual Search this past fall.)

It will be interesting to see what Google announces on the search front next week on December 7 and whether Microsoft managed to grab any mind share by going out publicly with its latest demos days before Google holds its dog and pony show….