Opinion

Windows Live Wave 4: Can it change “hearts and minds”?

Finally, it looks like Windows Live Wave 4 is just around the corner.  Microsoft last week began to talk publically about Messenger Wave 4, notably in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and in Amsterdam, where Messenger usage is heavy, to put it …

What’s a Zune phone?

Long Zheng was quick to dig around in last night’s updated Zune software, and quick to find reference to a %phone% (good work, btw!), and this just a day after Microsoft denied publically to Mary Jo Foley that the Zune …

The China Google rift: is it good for Bing?

googlebaibai Yesterday Google dropped quite a bombshell when it announced that, because of a series of attacks on Google and other companies by hackers trying to get access to Chinese human rights activists GMail accounts, it would reconsider its “approach to …

A Bing boycott? Why not boycott China?

Yesterday in a blog post, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof called for a boycott of Bing, because of the way it handles Chinese characters searches outside of China when searching for politically sensitive (to China) material.

Today in …

Right on schedule, news of an “imminent” MSFT-YHOO search deal

microsoft-yahoo We haven’t been commenting much on the buzz surrounding Bing’s first month numbers, partly because we’ve grown a little tired of “woohoo a .4% increase” posts, partly because we’ve been stuck in the real world a bit this summer, …

Microsoft’s Summer Of Live

OK so the official start of summer isn’t for a few weeks, but Microsoft is facing its most important period in perhaps its entire 30 year history, as initiatives in all its important consumer and online services come together.  How …

Kumo, Bing, or ???: Are secrets extinct?

Delicious Cherries! In the next few weeks, we’re going to be hearing a lot about Microsoft’s new brand for search.  We pretty much know it won’t be called “Live Search” anymore, and we’re hearing again and again that it won’t be called …

Is a Yahoo! search deal the reason for Kumo?

logo_yahoo Way back last February, when Microsoft first made a public offer to buy Yahoo!, part of what they were after was the brand.  Microsoft executives have been almost happy to point out that they have a brand problem, especially, according …

Marketing Windows Mobile to the world (sorry, tech bubble)

It’s easy to forget sometimes (especially living 40 miles from Redmond, like I do) that the whole world doesn’t work, or live, quite the way you think it would from reading Techmeme headlines.  In a number of markets Windows Live …

The numbers game: reading beyond the headlines

It wasn’t so much different for Benjamin Disraeli over a hundred years ago when he complained about three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.  We’ve seen lots of numbers thrown about in recent weeks.  We’ve been following …