Microsoft COO Warns Google Away From Corp Search 315
Forbes is reporting on comments made by Microsoft COO Kevin Turner, concerning the corporate search business. At a company conference in Boston, Turner referred to the enterprise search business as 'our house', and warned Google to stay out. From the article: "Those people are not going to be allowed to take food off our plate, because that is what they are intending to do ... Enterprise search is our business, it's our house and Google is not going to take that business"
Uh... (Score:5, Interesting)
MS needs to deliver a product before talking (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft has NEVER owned the enterprise search space. They don't have a single corporate appliance to help search large volumes. Their search in Exchange is downright disgraceful. Personally, I won't touch their indexing service (about a month after it came out in Windows 2000, they found security holes with it. Thanks but no thanks).
If they're talking about local search, things are just as bad. Their puppy mascot takes forever to find files, and if a file is removed or deleted from the search window, explorer.exe gets freaked out and sometimes puts up an error message.
It says volumes that 3rd-party companies have an easier time finding files on Microsoft volumes than MS's own tools. I personally use Google desktop. While it can take forever to load, it finds files and emails lightning quick. If you download it, be sure to try searching in email (both using Outlook's search and Google's toolbar) -- you'll be amazed at the difference.
MS has to produce something, anything, that says their serious about search. Windows Vista is their one shot, and it's looking pretty bad. It does something from a UI standpoint I find kind of ludicrous: you open the Start Menu, type a few letters to find a program and, if it can't find it, it looks for files and then searches the web through MSN. Huh? MS put it in the Programs menu -- it should search for programs. For reference, if you use the Spotlight search feature on Mac within System Preferences, it searches just that -- System Preferences. It doesn't look for files or search the web.
Re:Classic late-stage empire behavior (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wow, NEWS! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wow, NEWS! (Score:5, Interesting)
Sharepoint lockout! (Score:5, Interesting)
So, pretty much, our internal Google search is useless for finding any useful information, because all of the most active stuff is closed away in Sharepoint. So the google search appliance is at a disadvantage until it can support user / group ACLs and stuff.
Google could handily beat MS at enterprise search once they beat them at groupware... which shouldn't be too hard, save for MS's tight sharepoint integration with Exchange/Outlook. Fortunately, Google appears to be advancing on all these fronts, so they have their work cut out for them. But in the mean time, it looks like the MS exec has a point.
my students (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sharepoint lockout! (Score:1, Interesting)
Microsoft, Google both fail to see the big picture (Score:2, Interesting)
The first company to break that logjam will be a huge winner, with a market opportunity comparable at least to that of, say, app servers. Unless, of course, the whole thing is just open-sourced.
I've written up most of that argument in http://www.texttechnologies.com/2005/12/11/the-te
One thing in Google's favor, however, is their internal use of knowledge extraction [texttechnologies.com]. They seem to really be ahead of the competition in that regard.
Meanwhile, I've got to say -- search is one of the areas where Microsoft has been saber-rattling for a long time, to little effect. Just a couple of quick examples of what I mean:
1. In 1997, I was at the Verity user's conference, and a Microsoft guy there told me how Microsoft would soon be in the business.
2. A few years ago, a woman emailed me and told me she'd just joined Microsoft, and was personally writing all of their web search algorithms.
Smart move from MS (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sharepoint lockout! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Microsoft has all it needs to win and it will (Score:1, Interesting)
IMHO, they are *not* better than Google and are too arrogant about their own expertise to be able to know what they don't know.
There are many ex-FAST folk who left frustrated. Remember, at one point, they were a viable competitor for where Google is now.
Re:google already dominates (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wow, NEWS! (Score:2, Interesting)
MS got big buy doing what some call shady business practices, others call excellent business tactics. In either case, it wasn't by them telling a competitor openly not to stop on their terrain. Their two big products are Windows and Office. The GP mentions some other things that they are failing at big time. His point is that now that MS is big, they can't seem to do anything else. They have money and resources to make something spectacular and yet they can't seem to do it. For all the money and effort they are or were pouring into MSN, passport, hotmail, home entertainment, etc. they are making back neither money nor market share in any way comparable. For those reasons, if MS didn't have billions stored up, those products would hardly see the light of day or be worth considering. If someone else was making MSN, how many people would be using it? If someone else was making Defender, how many people would care? If someone else was making the Xbox, would anyone have ever heard of t he Xbox 360? Probably, most of those products would have been abysmal failures, or slightly profitable at best. They are feeding off of brand name and the revenue of other offerings. They aren't better in any way.
Too bad a five-year share price history doesn't mean anything for the vitality of the company in the overall scheme of things
I know you were being sarcastic, but it was not related to what the parent was saying. MS is a profitable company, and their stocks continue to rise over time. That makes them an excellent company in the eyes of stock holders. They come out with new products, expanding their assets again making them an excellent company for stock holders. But they are riding on the coattails of Office and Windows alone. They have very few other profitable products, let alone big revenue generators. Hence, the GP said "If Microsoft didn't have billions in the bank its new product offerings would not even blip on the radar."
Now for the mistruths in your post: Consoles are NOT always a loss leader. Nintendo has only sold their consoles at a loss for a few months total and even then they lose single digits on each sale when they do. Overall however, they have made money on their hardware while the software revenue was just icing on the cake. MS lost $5 billion (that's with a b) on the Xbox. Sony is also starting to turn a profit in hardware, but they have been rolling in money from software. Being first also did nothing to force neither Sony's nor Nintendo's hand. Both companies have been working on their next-gen systems for a while. Nintendo didn't just come up with the Wii's controller overnight, nor did Sony invent the Cell on a whim, because MS came out with a new console first.
Re:Google doesn't stand a chance!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh yes, MS gained 4.25% by paying registars to move unused parked domains to IIS. So the current market-share for IIS is 29.71%, whereas Apache has 61.25%. If that means that IIS is "beating" Apache, then Firefox is eating IE alive, since it's gaining market-share from IE fast. Strange thing that you weren't telling us THAT little fact.
And how exactly does that prove that Windows is growing faster than Linux is?