To be fair, there's room for interpretation regarding how aggressive this move is (or isn't). Microsoft's offered similar plug-ins for Firefox for quite some time, and no one's identified any real animosity there.
About three weeks ago, Google announced that Chrome would no longer support the
H.264 video codec. Now, following some unpleasantness over allegedly copied
search results, Microsoft's struck back by introducing an H.264 extension for
Chrome.
To be fair, there's room for interpretation regarding how aggressive this move
is (or isn't). Microsoft's offered similar plug-ins for Firefox for quite some
time, and no one's identified any real animosity there.
But on the official
IEBlog, a post stated this morning,
"Developers want confidence that what they write will work for consumers.
Consumers and businesses want confidence that video on the Web will continue
work - and that they will not face legal risk for using it. Google's decision
to drop support for H.264 from its browser seems to undermine these goals."
Meanwhile, on the
Interoperability @ Microsoft blog, a
different post added, "At Microsoft we respect that Windows customers want the
best experience of the web including the ability to enjoy the widest range of
content available on the Internet in H.264 format."
So there you have it: subtle arguments that what Google's doing isn't in
everybody's best interest.
Now place your bets on whether a future version of Chrome will break
Microsoft's extension, and if so, how
long it will be before this devolves into engineers from Google and Microsoft
having a loud exchange of the "He's touching me!"/"No I'm not!" variety.
It looks like Microsoft isn't going to defy Google and Baidu and achieve a great
victory in China anytime soon. Three and a half months after it began, a
partnership involving Bing and a search engine owned by Alibaba has already
ended.
To be fair, little is known about the situation, and it could have been someone
at Microsoft who pulled the plug. The comments of one Microsoft representative
hint that a corporate memo didn't exactly go around, however.
Owen Fletcher reported, "Pilot
cooperation between Microsoft Corp.'s Bing search engine and Alibaba Group
search website Etao has ended, a spokeswoman for a Microsoft joint venture in
China said Monday."
Then Fletcher continued, "The spokeswoman for Shanghai MSN Network
Communications Technology Co., a Microsoft joint venture that operates Bing in
China, said she was unsure when the cooperation ended and called it 'uncertain'
whether it would be restored."
That's less than encouraging news for Microsoft supporters, since a different
representative labeled China "the
most important strategic market for
Microsoft" in late 2009, and Steve Ballmer
didn't back down during the Google
hacking brouhaha.
On the bright side, Bing remains in beta in China, so it's not as if Microsoft
has already put lots of time and energy into making the venture succeed.
Microsoft shareholders may not be impressed (the company's stock has been a
little droopy in after-hours trading), but the quarter ending December 31st
seems to have gone well. Microsoft reported its earnings this afternoon and
beat analysts' forecasts by significant margins.
The key figures: analysts thought Microsoft would report earnings per share of
$0.68. The company reported earnings per share of $0.77, instead, which
represents a pretty significant jump. Also, Microsoft reported $19.95 billion
in revenue rather than $19.14 billion, and $6.63 billion in net income rather
than $5.92 billion.
Otherwise, Microsoft was quick to share the fact that it's sold more than 300
million Windows 7 licenses, and that the beta version of Internet Explorer 9 has
been downloaded over 20 million times (making it "Microsoft's fastest downloaded
beta browser of all time").
Kevin Turner, the company's CTO, also stated, "Business demand for our
productivity and infrastructure products and cloud solutions is strong. Office
had a huge quarter, exceeding everyone's expectations, and our roadmap for cloud
productivity with Office 365 makes products like SharePoint, Exchange, Lync and
Dynamics CRM even more attractive to our customers."
So all in all, it was a rather strong quarter for Microsoft. The biggest source
of disappointment appears to relate to net income being a touch down on a
year-over-year basis. And some folks are unhappy that the company released its
earnings report a few minutes early.
Microsoft's stock is now down 0.28 percent in after-hours trading.
President Obama appointed General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt as chairman of the
President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
Having worked with Immelt in the past, Ballmer apparently wanted the world to
know where he stands. He released the following statement on the Official
Microsoft blog:
"Jeff Immelt and I started our careers together at Proctor & Gamble, and I have
enormous respect for the success he�s had at GE. He is an ideal business leader
to chair the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and help drive a
focus on what we can all do to increase American competitiveness and create new
jobs."
Microsoft is all about some competitiveness lately, as evidenced by the company
recently
joining Fairsearch, the coalition
ruffling Google's feathers over its pending acquisition of ITA Software.
Yesterday during Google's earnings call, Schmidt managed to sneak in a jab at
Microsoft (at least that's how we interpreted it) by
saying that Googe's competitors are assisting in spreading misinformation
about competition.
Schmidt has referred to Bing as its main competitor in recent months, and Google
told us a while back, "Microsoft is our
largest competitor and lobbies regulators against every acquisition we make."
Last year, Google invested in Zynga and Ngmoco, acquired Slide and Jambool, and
unveiled games intended for the Chrome Web Store in rapid succession. Now, the
search giant may be ready to take another game-related step, as it's hired
Kinect developer Johnny Chung Lee to join a special projects group.
Additional details are scarce. Indeed, with respect to his new position,
Lee only wrote on his blog, "I have left
Microsoft to join a special projects team at Google." Then Lee's "About Me"
section indicates his new official title is "Rapid Evaluator."
We take that to mean he'll be in a position to approve or veto lots of different
ideas or products.
Here's a bit more info regarding Lee's previous achievements and goals, anyway.
He wrote, "In 2008, I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a PhD in
Human-Computer Interaction. My research interests are in exploring novel
interface technology that can influence the lives of many people."
Also, if you run a Google search on Lee's full name, some interesting stuff
involving
Wii hacks comes up.
It should be interesting to see what happens next. Although Google hasn't
accomplished much in terms of gaming (the
Pac-Man Google Doodle probably
represents its crowning achievement to date), Lee may be able to help the
company make some significant strides.
AdAge published
an article that sent ripples throughout
the blogosphere with some questionable information. While not the basis of the
article (that was mainly about how Facebook has become a dominant force in
advertising), the article suggested that "the third-biggest advertiser [on
Facebook] was a completely unknown brand called Make-My-Baby.com, citing "ComScore's
third-quarter analysis."
As more information has surfaced throughout the day, we've learned that comScore
claimed (in an
email to Danny Sullivan) that
"Make-my-baby was not one of the top advertisers on Facebook." It remains
unclear whether comScore was just initially wrong and AdAge passed on the wrong
info, or whether the inaccuracy started with AdAge.
Brandon McCormick, a spokesperson for Facebook itself, tells WebProNews, "Not
only is make-my-baby.com not one of our largest advertisers, they are not an
advertiser at all. In fact, their practices are against our ad policies and
would be rejected as a result. This is true whether they tried to run ads with
us or an affiliate did."
So let's back up for a minute. The practices referred to, which are the
practices that made this a compelling story from the get go, were that make-my-baby.com
was forcing users to install a toolbar that switched their default search to
Bing, as the site was apparently run by a company trying to capitalize on a
Microsoft affiliate program.
Google's Matt Cutts, who discovered the practice and wrote about it on Google
Buzz last night, noted that he was quickly able to find additional sites that
were doing the same thing. All of this led to us
questioning how much of this was
actually taking place, and whether it could be playing a role in Bing's
impressive growth. I think this is still a valid question, but there is a pretty
big difference between such a site being one of the top advertisers on the
world's largest social network (with 1.75 billion impressions, as reported by
AdAge), and not advertising on Facebook at all. That greatly changes things in
terms of reach.
While it was never my intent to suggest that Bing owed its impressive growth
entirely to sites like this, it seemed possible that it could at least be
padded to some extent, and could still be even if to a much, much lesser
extent.
Either way, the whole thing appears to have worked out for the best, as a
Microsoft spokesperson told us, "Distribution deals and affiliate programs are
an important part of how all search engines introduce their product to
customers. That said, we have been made aware of some practices from a specific
publisher that are not compliant with the guidelines, best practices and
principles put in place by Bing. As a result, the relationship with this
publisher will be terminated."
Update: Sullivan
was
sent a copy of the comScore report by
AdAge. Apparently the confusion stemmed from make-my-baby.com being listed as
the third largest adertiser in social networking, based on comScore's
information - a category, which was comprised of Facebook, MySpace, and other
social networking sites). So while the site may not have been a big advertiser
on Facebook, it would appear that it was still a big social media advertiser -
and still a problem.
Article updated. See below. I have also
posted a new piece based on new
information that has come to light.
Facebook took in an estimated $1.86 billion in advertising revenue last year,
according to
eMarketer, and
AdvertisingAge says that the top two
advertisers were AT&T and Match.com. Google was number five.
It is the third-largest advertiser on Facebook, however, that has raised a few
eyebrows, including those of Google's Matt Cutts. The advertiser is something
called make-my-baby.com - not a well-known brand that you'd expect to see in the
top three.
Update:
Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand
writes: "An
Ad Age article suggests that Make-My-Baby is Facebook�s third largest
advertiser, based on a comScore report. But comScore tells me this isn�t so."
That certainly changes things, but it is still unclear where the confusion
stems from, and it doesn't really change what is happening, even if the ads
aren't being shown on as large a scale as initially thought (reports stemming
from that AdAge piece have make-my-baby.com, which has now been taken down,
buying 1.75 billion ad impressions in the third quarter alone).
Have
you been to any sites lately that urged you to install a browser plug-in
changing you default search?
Let us know.
Cutts, the head of Google's webspam team, said the following in
a Google Buzz update early this morning
(via Marshall Kirkpatrick, who has
an interesting write-up of the
situation):
Visiting make-my-baby.com instantly
prompts you to install a browser plugin. The "terms and conditions" link takes
you to http://mmb.bingstart.com/terms/ which has phrases like "If Chrome ("CR")
is installed on your PC we may change the default setting of your home page on
CR to Bingstart.com."
I also noticed this phrase in the Zugo
toolbar section: "To uninstall the Toolbar, please visit the Toolbar FAQ (
http://www.zugo.com/toolbar/faq/ )." Sadly, that url is a broken link. It looks
like a few people have had trouble uninstalling the Bing/Zugo toolbar, according
to pages like http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/746034 or http://mymountain.blogspot.com/2010/03/how-to-remove-bingzugo-toolbar-hijack.html
If make-my-baby.com is Facebook's 3rd
biggest advertiser, I wonder how many people are installing this software
without reading the fine print that says "Installing the toolbar includes
managing the browser default search settings and setting your homepage to
bing.com" ?
The toolbar comes from a company called Zugo (as Cutts mentioned), which is
apparently an affiliate company trying to drive traffic to Bing so it can make
some money from Microsoft. After some discussion about the find, Cutts also
says, "It's entirely possible, even likely, that FB and MSFT didn't realize this
was going on. I wouldn't assume they were aware of what was going on."
Cutts did point this out to Bing publicly via Twitter, but there has been no
response from Bing thus far (at least publicly).
At the time of this writing, both Microsoft and Facebook
have been silent on the matter (we've reached out to both for comment, and will
certainly update if we get a response).
Update: We've now
received comment from a Microsoft spokesperson, who tells us:
"Distribution deals and affiliate programs are an important part of how all search engines introduce their product to customers. That said, we have been made aware of some practices that are in conflict with Bing's principles and are addressing them directly with this affiliate partner."
Update 2: We've now received an updated comment from a Microsoft spokesperson, which now says:
"Distribution deals and affiliate programs are an important part of how all search engines introduce their product to customers. That said, we have been made aware of some practices from a specific publisher that are not compliant with the guidelines, best practices and principles put in place by Bing. As a result, the relationship with this publisher will be terminated."
Update 3:
We finally received comment from Facebook, and this one definitely changes
things. Facebook's Brandon McCormick tells us, "Not only is make-my-baby.com not
one of our largest advertisers, they are not an advertiser at all. In fact,
their practices are against our ad policies and would be rejected as a result.
This is true whether they tried to run ads with us or an affiliate did."
It would appear AdAge got some bad info, that set this whole chain of events
into motion. I will be posting another piece on this with more clarification.
One has to wonder how much of Bing's growth can be attributed to practices like
this. It might not be a substantial amount, but on the other hand...third
largest advertiser on Facebook? And this is just one example of a site like
this. It didn't take Cutts long to find several more with a quick search.
There's no telling how many site like this are actually out there.
"It's pretty remarkable that even at the top of this giant success story of
Facebook advertising, and perhaps near the top of the story of Bing's steady
rise as a search engine, is a Web 1.0-style pulling the wool over the eyes of
gullible internet users," says Kirkpatrick.
Bing's share of the search market rose from 11.8% to 12.0% from November to
December,
according to comScore numbers released last week.
It's worth noting, as mentioned by a commenter in the Buzz conversation, that
Cutts broke this story using Google Buzz, which goes to show - it doesn't matter
if the site is called Twitter, Quora, or Google Buzz - if there is interesting
content there, it's got to have some value.
Webspam in a growing problem.
Watch our exclusive interview with Blekko CEO Rich
Skrenta, who talks about the trend.
Update: Sullivan
was sent
a copy of the comScore report by AdAge. Apparently the confusion
stemmed from make-my-baby.com being listed as the third largest adertiser in
social networking, based on comScore's information - a category, which was
comprised of Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sites). So while the
site may not have been a big advertiser on Facebook, it would appear that it was
still a big social media advertiser - and still a problem.
SEE NEW
PIECE ON TOPIC WITH UPDATED INFO.
Do you think sites like make-my-baby.com
have contributed to Bing's growth?
Share your thoughts.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the worldwide availability of
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online today at
an event in Redmond. This is the cloud-based version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM
2011, which will go head to head with other cloud-based CRM products from
companies like Salesforce.com and Oracle.
"Sales professionals are at the heart of almost every successful business," said
Ballmer. "Microsoft Dynamics CRM redefines productivity by offering an
industry-leading product that is fully embracing the cloud. The things that make
Microsoft Dynamics CRM an industry leader include giving sales professionals a
familiar user experience, enabling greater collaboration, streamlining of
processes and access to real-time data so they can improve their customers�
experiences and effectively compete in the market."
"The service is available today as a cloud offering," he said. "This is the
first time we've made a release in the cloud before we have done so in the
server version, and I think that really reflects the push by Microsoft into the
cloud."
"I think our customers are really going to embrace this new release," he added.
"It brings with it the ease of use that sales, marketing and service
professionals expect; the ease of deployment for departmental managers; low cost
and agility for IT; and most importantly, the kind of functionality, capability
and value that's really going to drive revenue and drive customer satisfaction."
Over 11,500 customers and 400 partners have already been using Microsoft
Dynamics CRM 2011 as part of the beta program, Microsoft says.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is currently available in 40 markets including:
Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile,
Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong,
Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico,
Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania,
Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom,
and the United States.
The company is giving special rates to customers of Salesforce and Oracle if
they switch to Microsoft.
The on-premises and partner-hosted versions will be globally available on Feb.
28, 2011.
Today,
Microsoft launched WebMatrix, a new tool
described as a way to make web development easier for people of all skill sets
- from the novice to the expert. Now, PayPal has announced the PayPalX helper
built specifically for Microsoft's offering.
PayPalX Helper lets developers integrate
payments within their web sites or e-commerce applications built using WebMatrix.
"Using this helper one can, with minimal programming effort, enable customers on
their web site to pay for their purchases using their PayPal accounts," the
company
explains. "The helper provides easier
interfaces to the PayPal Button Manager and the Adaptive Payments APIs. The
Button Manager API interface provides the ability to create (and manage) PayPal
buttons (like Add to Cart, Buy Now, etc.) that allows customers to purchase
single or multiple items."
"The Adaptive Payments API interface provides the ability to process payments
from simple to complex scenarios like refunds, parallel and chained payments,
preapprovals, etc. In addition to the support for PayPal APIs, the helper also
provides a payment page for the bakery application template provided in the tool
to demonstrate how to use the PayPalX helper to enable simple and chained
payments," PayPal adds.
WebMatrix provides users with a Web server, a database, and programming
frameworks, letting users code, test, and deploy both deploy both ASP.NET and
PHP applications side by side. It also includes built-in SEO features. It also
includes built-in SEO features.
WebMatrix lets users create sites using code provided through templates or using
existing free open source Web apps like WordPress, Joomla, DotNetNuke or Umbraco.
Microsoft says nearly 40 open source application partners are supporting
WebMatrix.
Microsoft has released a new web development tool called
WebMatrix, which the company says is
designed to let developers of "all skill levels" create, customize, and publish
websites to the Internet.
WebMatrix brings together a Web server, a database, and programming frameworks,
letting users code, test, and deploy both deploy both ASP.NET and PHP
applications side by side. It also includes built-in SEO features.
Users can run an SEO report and find how to make their sites more visible to
search engines. Microsoft says the product "provides clear guidance on how to
make your site better, and even offers to take you right to the file in your
site you need to fix."
The tool lets users create sites using code provided through templates or using
existing free open source Web apps like WordPress, Joomla, DotNetNuke or Umbraco.
Microsoft says nearly 40 open source application partners are supporting
WebMatrix.
"Our Web platform offers a complete ecosystem of products, partners and
technologies all aimed at helping developers succeed on the Web," says S.
Somasegar, SVP of the Developer Division at Microsoft. "Every day, more people
are looking to build, publish and manage a website, and now, with WebMatrix, we
provide developers of all skill levels with a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use
solution to get their sites online."
According to the
2010 numbers from Royal Pingdom, there
were 255 million websites as of December, with 21.4 million added in 2010. As of
June, there were 1.97 billion Internet users worldwide.
WebMatrix is available in nine languages so far.
Bing has added a new feature to its search results in enhanced auto results,
which show information about automobiles right on the search results pages.
The Bing Team writes:
Now you can search for your favorite
car and Bing will assemble all of the important information (price, Fuel
Economy, user rating, listings in your area) as well as quick links to
additional information right within the search result.
Simply enter in the make and model and
Bing autos will pull together everything you need to research in one place. You
use the filters in the left rail to narrow down your search by model, price,
year or comparable vehicle.
You can see the feature in action in a video shown
here, or you can simply go to Bing and
try it out. I find that for some queries, you have to add a year to get the
results to come up immediately, though if you leave it off, you can still get to
the results by clicking one of the options (which contains a year) in the left
rail.
The feature is in line with other recently launched Bing features, such as those
for
sports tickets and
TV listings. The feature really falls in
line with Bing's whole "Decision Engine" philosophy it launched with from the
beginning - providing answers directly in search results without providing the
need to click through to other sites to get the info.
The auto results provide info from
MSN Autos, and when you click through on
the links within these results, that is where you will be taken.
At the end of December, some Hotmail users experienced problems with their email
- it was gone. Messages and folders went completely missing from their accounts.
Luckily, for those users, the emails came back.
Microsoft says it recovered 100% of email and folders for the accounts affected.
Unfortunately, for those who didn't sign into their accounts between the time of
the incident and the time the account was restored, any messages sent to their
accounts during that time would have bounced.
Microsoft has apologized for the incident, but it can't have been very good for
the service's reputation with users, particularly considering there plenty of
other options out there. Hotmail has hundreds of millions of users and
competitors like Yahoo and Google will be happy to take as many of them as
possible.
The whole thing makes you stop and consider how much users are relying on
third-parties for essential communication. Who's to say people didn't miss
extremely important messages during that period?
Microsoft's Mike Schackwitz
details exactly what happened on the
company's Inside Windows Live Blog:
In Hotmail, one way we monitor the health of the email service is through
automated tests. We set up a number of accounts with different configurations,
and then use automated tests to log into these accounts, simulate normal user
activity and behavior, and report when errors are found. We use scripts to
create and delete these test accounts in bulk. The way we delete a test account
is to remove its record from a group of directory servers that route users and
incoming mail to the correct mailbox.
On December 30th, we had an error in a
script that inadvertently removed the directory records of a small number of
real user accounts along with a set of test accounts. Please note that the email
messages and folders of impacted users were not deleted; only their inbox
location in the directory servers was removed. Therefore when they logged in, a
new mailbox was automatically created for them on a new storage server that
didn�t contain their old messages and folders. This is why the accounts received
the �Welcome to Hotmail� message.
Read
the post for further explanation.
It's not like Microsoft is the first provider to experience downtime. Google has
always bragged about its Gmail uptime (and has a
dashboard where users can monitor it),
but it's gone down on occasion too. Facebook is trying to redefine email and
electronic communication with its social inbox, but Facebook
recently went down for a lot of users itself.
Twitter is no replacement for email, but a lot of people communicate with it
frequently, and that fail whale appears fairly frequently.
Microsoft says it's updating its infrastructure, and changing its alert process,
as well as its feedback process to take preventative action against future
incidents. Unfortunately, and this goes for any company, it's usually the issues
you don't think to prevent that end up costing people.
Microsoft made a slew of announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
More on that
here. The company also revealed a bunch
of numbers for 2010 that you might find interesting.
So, let's get right to them:
Xbox/Kinect
- 8 million: Number of Kinects sold in first 60 days
- 50 million: Xbox 360s sold to date
- 30 million: Number of Xbox LIVE members
Windows Phone 7
- 100: Average number of new apps in the marketplace each day
- 5,500: Apps available in the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace
- 20,000: Developers registered to develop apps for Windows Phone 7
- 1.5 million: Windows Phone 7s sold by phone manufacturers in the first six
weeks after launch
- 60: Number of mobile operators that carry Windows Phone 7
- 30: Number of countries where Windows Phone 7 is available
Windows 7
- 7: number of Windows 7 licenses sold per second
- 20 million: Number of downloads of Internet Explorer 9 beta
- 500 million+: Number of Windows Live users worldwide
- 20: Percentage of PCs connected to the Internet running Windows 7
There are no new Bing numbers to report, unfortunately, though Microsoft CEO
Steve Ballmer did acknowledge the search engine's healthy growth in 2010. It is
powering Yahoo Search and Facebook's web search.
The Consumer Elecronics Show (CES) in Vegas has already been a big event for
Microsoft, and it doesn't even end until January 9. CEO Steve Ballmer reflected
on the past year, and introduced some elements of where the company is headed.
"(It) was a very, very exciting year for our customers," Ballmer said. "We
launched Windows Phone 7, Office 2010, and Kinect, and we introduced Internet
Explorer 9 and Office 365. We saw great growth in our Bing and Azure services,
and with the amazing success of Windows 7, it's truly been a year like none
other." Microsoft has a billion customers, the company says.
"The products that I mentioned resulted from big technology bets that we've
made," added Ballmer. "Bets on the cloud, natural user interface, new smart
client technology, machine learning."
Here's Steve Ballmer's Keynote:
The Next Windows
The next version of Windows will support System on a Chip (SoC) architectures,
including ARM-based systems from NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, the
company announced.
"With today's announcement, we're showing the flexibility and resiliency of
Windows through the power of software and a commitment to world-class
engineering. We continue to evolve Windows to deliver the functionality
customers demand across the widest variety of hardware platforms and form
factors," said Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live
Division at Microsoft."
More on this here.
Tablets
Ballmer introduced a new lineup of Windows 7 tablets. Including: a dual-screen
PC from Acer, the Samsung PC 7 Sliding Series, and an Asus Tablet PC. Mashable
has a good write up on these.
It will be interesting to see how the devices compete with the iPad in the
future. My hunch is that when combined, they will do just fine. As long as
consumers are using tablets with Windows, Microsoft will be happy.
Surface
Microsoft and Samsung unveiled the next generation of Surface, giving LCD panels
"the power to see without the use of cameras." People can share and collaborate
using a large, thin display that recognizes fingers, hands and other objects
placed on the screen.
More on this here.
Xbox/Kinect
The company is aiming for Xbox to become the "hub of your living room". They
announced new Kinect-enabled entertainment experiences, and new Xbox Live gaming
titles. Hulu Plus will also be coming to Xbox Live.
"It is your gaming system, but it�s your movies, it�s your TV shows, and it�s
your sporting events. It�s your social interactions, all delivered directly to
the biggest screen in your house."
The Xbox team introduced a new social experience called Avatar Kinect that will
use Kinect's camera and sensor and facial recognition technology to let a person
control their avatar�s movements and expressions; when they smile, frown, nod
and speak. More
on this here.
The company also affirmed a commitment to gaming on other platforms like the PC
and Windows Phone 7.
Amazon released its "Best of 2010" lists today, which list the bestselling,
most-wished-for, and most popular gift products of the year.
Kindle Dominates Electronics
It's been a good year for Amazon's own Kindle, as it was the bestselling product
of the year, as well as the most wished for and the most popular gift, in the
electronics category. "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" was the bestselling
Kindle book, and the most wished for Kindle book. Interestingly enough, George
W. Bush's "Decision Points" was the most popular gift Kindle book.
Wireless
In the Wireless & Accessories category, the Samsung Captivate Android Phone
(AT&T) was the bestselling product. The most wished for was the LG KP500 Cookie
Unlocked Phone. The most gifted was the Nokia N900 Unlocked Phone/Mobile
Computer.
Computers
In computers, the Apple MacBook Pro 13.3-Inch Laptop was the bestselling and the
most wished for. The Toshiba Satellite TruBrite 15.6-Inch Laptop was the most
gifted.
Software
Microsoft should be happy (and Google not so much), as Microsoft Office 2010
Home & Student was the bestselling and most wished for product in software.
Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 (Win/Mac) was the most gifted.
Movies
In movies, "The Blind Side" was the bestselling DVD, and Sherlock Holmes was the
bestselling in the Video on Demand category. Meanwhile, Inception was the most
wished for DVD (it's been out for a much shorter amount of time than the Blind
Side), and "Dexter: The Fourth Season" was the most wished for in Video on
Demand. Toy Story 3 was the most popular gift movie.
Music
In music, "The Gift" by Susan Boyle was bestselling (also most gifted), "Speak
Now" by Taylor Swift was the bestselling MP3 Album (also the most wished for in
music). The bestselling MP3 song was "I Gotta Feeling" by The Black Eyed Peas.
Games
In the video games category, Call of Duty: Black Ops was the bestselling and
most wished for, but Just Dance 2 was the most gifted.
The Rest
It looks like Santa was checking the kids' wishlists, as LEGO building sets were
both the most wished for and the most gifted item in the toys category.
You can get a look at the complete lists
here. They show a lot more categories,
like Books, Home, Garden & Pets, Grocery, Health & Personal Care, Beauty, Baby,
Clothing & Accessories, Shoes & Accesories, Jewery, Watches, Sports & Outdoors,
Home Improvement, and Automotive.
While Amazon is only one online retailer, it is the largest, and these lists
should paint a pretty good picture of what people have been buying and wanting
in 2010.
It can only be a company of the stature as Microsoft that can continue battling and trying real hard to make it big in every field that it enters. No matter how much competition it faces from stalwarts like Apple, Google, etc. in the Tablet market (which is dominated by iPads) Microsoft is bent on making it big here too. This time the idea is to run a demo on using the Windows 7 Tablet at CES 2011, wherein Steve Ballmer is reportedly said to showcase Samsung and Dell devices along with other manufacturers. The focus this time would be to encourage partners of Microsoft to develop apps that emphasizes on HTML5 and these apps will be hosted on Microsoft�s website rather than being sold through specific agents.
Rumors doing rounds suggest that the Samsung tablet to be portrayed in the event will operate with Windows 7 in the landscape mode and will possess another OS interface while in the portrait mode. When asked to comment on any of the above news, spokesperson Sarah Reid, who works at the software giant�s public relations agency, Waggener-Edstrom said, �Microsoft makes it a practice to not comment on rumors or speculation.�
This is not the first time that Microsoft has tried to show off its Windows 7
tablets. Apparently, a year ago at the CES 2010,
Ballmer showcased
HP�s
Slate tablet which later began developing its own webOS operating
system instead of running on Windows 7. There are also heavy but obvious chances
of Samsung and Dell operating on
Android tablets, but will Microsoft�s
Windows 7 get some respite from tablet makers; this only time will tell. Kevin
Burden, a vice president at ABI Research said �The
division at Dell that would build a tablet is the same division that built the
Streak, and those guys have told me that Android is the key operating system for
their mobile phones.� Burden added and by this made it clear that Windows 7 will
have a tough fight �I don�t imagine they�d want to take whatever work they�re
doing on the Android tablet and come out with a Windows 7 or Windows Phone 7
tablet. Dell�s building expertise in Android, so 80 percent of their development
is going into that OS.�
Another big question now is which OS will Microsoft tablets run on and the
response to this will in fact answer yet another question of how Microsoft will
position its tablets.
Windows 7 put into any device can do
anything and everything, but you might as well have a PC for this. But the
Windows Phone 7 is tailor made for Tablets which showers users with whatever
applications they want, like that in a Smartphone. Since it is clear from
Ballmer that it is going to be a Windows 7 tablet, all we can do is wait. Wait
until the Windows 8 is launched since most of us already own a PC and the launch
of
Windows 8 in all like-ability won�t
happen for the next couple of years.
There are two reasons why Microsoft is striving to make it big in the Tablet market. One is its own efforts to cannibalize its PC market and, two is because according to Goldman Sachs, tablets will eat into 35 percent of the PC market next year. These are palpable reasons for someone who has made it so big in the PC market to now make it big in the Tablet market.
I can only wish Microsoft � all the very best for their tablet endeavors.
The deadline for Yahoo Search Marketing advertisers to transition their
campaigns to Microsoft's adCenter is approaching. You've had ample time to do,
but there are no doubt some procrastinators out there.
"Given what a busy time of year this is for everyone, both personally and
professionally, you may have the feeling that there�s something you�re supposed
to do, but haven�t yet. Did you forget something?"
asks Microsoft's Ricky Poole.
"With all of the holiday hustle and bustle, I wanted to take a minute to remind
any of you in the US and Canada who may still have campaigns in Yahoo! Search
Marketing that the transition tool will be closing on January 5, 2011," he adds.
"If you have not yet transitioned your PPC accounts from Yahoo! to adCenter,
after January 5th you will need to do so manually through exporting and
importing your campaigns."
Yahoo and Microsoft
completed the search transition in the
U.S. and Canada in October. Microsoft even
extended its adCenter support hours
during the transition.
If you still have questions about the transition, you should be able to find
your answers
here.
In a recent article, we
asked if Microsoft could compete with the iPad?
Well, it would appear that they may be trying in more ways than one.
According to
a report from Bloomberg, Microsoft will
announce a version of Windows that runs on ARM technology at the Consumer
Electronics Show in early January. According to the report, which cites "two
people familiar with Microsoft's plans" as the source, the software would be
tailored to battery-powered devices like tablets and other handhelds.
We've seen other reports indicating that Microsoft would be unveiling some new
tablets in a new effort to compete with Apple's hugely successful iPad.
Microsoft recently launched Windows Phone 7 to compete with Apple's iOS and
Google's Android in the smartphone space. This week, the company finally
revealed some info about sales of devices running this operating system. The
company revealed that manufacturers sold 1.5 million phones in the first six
weeks.
As our own Doug Caverly
pointed out, Android's Andy Rubin
rcently tweeted that over 300,000 Android phones were being activated every day,
and Apple recently announced that it sold 14.1 million iPhones in the third
quarter.
While the numbers on Windows Phone 7 might not be astonishing so far, the
operating system did get some pretty good reviews, and I wouldn't write it off
just yet. It will be very interesting to see if Microsoft emerges as a big part
of the conversation in mobile computing over the next year.
What do you think? Can Microsoft take on Apple and Google in the mobile
operating system realm?
�
Windows Phone 7 Sales Reach 1.5 Million
Android and iOS fanatics are likely to be all smiles today. Microsoft's at last
released a figure related to the sales of Windows Phone 7 devices, and it's not
anything that'll have investors dumping their shares of Google and Apple in
order to get behind Steve Ballmer.
A quick refresher: on December 8th, Android guru Andy Rubin
tweeted that more than 300,000 Android
phones were being activated each day. Also, Apple announced not too long ago
that 14.1 million iPhones were sold in the third quarter of this year, which
works out to about 157,000 per day.
By comparison, Achim Berg, Corporate Vice President of the Mobile Communications
Business and Marketing Group at Microsoft, shared in the
Microsoft News Center this morning, "We
are pleased that phone manufacturers sold over 1.5 million phones in the first
six weeks . . ."
And that's only "phones being bought and stocked by mobile operators and
retailers on their way to customers," not necessarily phones winding up with new
owners.
Still, Berg claims to view 1.5 million as a reasonable - or even good - number,
considering that the Windows Phone 7 platform is new. Microsoft will continue
to back the operating system.
A couple other relevant facts: several OS updates are on the way, and there are
already over 4,000 apps in the Windows Phone 7 marketplace.
Reports indicate that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is expected to unveil some new
slates from Samsung and Dell at CES next month that are designed to compete with
Apple's incredibly popular iPad.
The company has not confirmed, and the sources of the info are unnamed, but
evidently trusted by the New York Times, which
reports:
The Samsung device is described as
"similar in size and shape to the Apple iPad, although it is not as thin. It
also includes a unique and slick keyboard that slides out from below for easy
typing."
The people familiar with this device
said it would run the Windows 7 operating system when in landscape mode, but
will also have a layered interface that will appear when the keyboard is hidden
and the device is held in a portrait mode.
Apple's iPad has been a huge seller. Can Microsoft's platform attain similar
success? A keyboard and familiar Windows interface would no doubt be appealing
to a lot of users, particularly if it is just an option that is available
alongside a more iPad-like touch interface. This could provide the best of both
worlds if it's done right.
One of the biggest complaints about the iPad is that it's not the easiest thing
to type on, particularly if you have large hands.
Microsoft is a little late to the market in this space, but apparently not as
late as it was to the smartphone market (with the recent launch of Windows Phone
7). Granted, we don't know when these knew slates would actually see the
consumer market.
Microsoft is of course not just competing with Apple, but all makers of tablets
and mobile computer operating systems, and that includes Google, which is
gearing up for the consumer launch of its Chrome operating system next year.
It's not on tablets, but it's still going to be an option for consumers looking
for a new mobile computer. Most people aren't going to buy a tablet
and a notebook. Google has the
tablets covered with Android, however, like with the
Samsung Galaxy Tab, and more to come.
No matter how you slice it, iPad sales are bound to be affected, simply based on
the fact that it won't be the only option in its class anymore. It will be
particularly interesting to see how big of a hand Microsoft has in the
competition.
Bing introduced a handful of new features. The one that will likely catch the
most interest is the extension of its
recent announcement regarding Facebook. Now, Bing will start
showing you which of your Facebook friends have liked search results as they
appear in your searches.
Are
"likes" from your friends sprinkled into search results enough to get you to use
Bing?
Let us know.
Social (Facebook)
"Starting today, if your search results include a specific link that has also
been 'liked' by someone in your Facebook network the link will be highlighted as
'Liked' within Bing," Microsoft's Bing team
explains. "This gets especially
interesting for a query like 'Xbox' where my friend 'Liked' the 'Kinect' site
and while our algorithms didn't feel it was relevant enough to make it the
'answer' we reference above, we are still able to indicate that my friend liked
that link that happened to show up within the results."
This will be one clear advantage that Bing has over Google in terms of regular
web search. Google has done a lot involving delivering social results, but
Facebook data are THE social results that matter most - at least as long as
Facebook is the dominant social site that it is today. With people constantly
"liking" content all over the web, this can be a great indicator of relevance on
a personalized level. It's going to catch your attention when you notice your
friend appear in the search results.
Bing has been running a similar feature in search results for several weeks,
including likes from places like CitySearch, but there should be a much more
broad set of potential results that will include "like" info now. It appears the
feature may still be rolling out, so if you don't see the "liked" results,
you're not the only one. I do get a message about it when I search with Bing,
but after some testing, I'm clearly not getting these results.
For example, as illustrated by Bing
here, I should see when my friend has
"liked" a movie on IMDB underneath the IMDB result for that movie on Bing. I
have tested this with a specific movie that I made sure one of my friends had
"liked" and that "like" did not appear under the result.
Sports Tickets
Bing has also
added sports ticket info from FanSnap
directly into the search experience, so users can view ticket results from 57
ticket companies, see ticket selection and price ranges, find the best ticket
prices, and access a "view-from-seat" feature.
Image Search
Bing has also made changes to how it presents and organizes image search
results. "The first thing you will notice is our new Instant Answer that
organizes a rich collage of images directly into the main results page," Bing
explains. "Once you click through to the
'images' page you will notice that we've populated the tabs with the most common
search queries associated with a given image."
"Instead of making you qualify that you're looking for (Casablanca, Morocco or
Casablanca, the movie), we have organized the tabs so that one simple click gets
you to what you�re looking for," Bing adds.
Local
For local search, Bing has added
interior views, enhanced OpenTable integration for
restaurants, real-time transit and Streetside for Mobile. Bing
has partnered with EveryScape Eats, which provides imagery of restaurant
interiors. These can be accessed by clicking "step inside" on Bing Local details
pages (it utilzes Microsoft's Silverlight). For now, it includes about 5,000
restaurants, mostly in Boston, but the company will add locations and cities
over time. We'll see if they expand beyond restaurants. Google has already been
experimenting with taking pictures inside businesses.
Additionally, Bing users can access local details pages for restaurants that are
signed up with OpenTable and search for available reservations from Bing
itself.
Bing Mobile on the iPhone now has "up-to-the-minute" data for transit agencies
(in Seattle, Boston, and San Francisco so far), and Streetside - Bing's
eqivalent of Google's Streetview is available on Bing Mobile now. Bing has also
made
adjustments
to its map style and a
bunch
of other updates to its iPhone and Andriod apps.
Will This All Help Bing Increase
Its Market Share?
As we've
discussed in the past, Bing has a lot of
things that could work in its favor in terms of helping it grow its search
market share, and some of these new features (namely the Facebook likes) won't
hurt. The company also introduced some
Facebook sharing features for Shopping Search
a couple weeks ago.
Will the new features help Bing grow its market share? Tell us what you think.
Microsoft has some interesting news out for Hotmail users. The company has
partnered with some other companies to bring a new kind of email to the inbox -
one that is as up to date as possible, and lets users interact with sites from
within the email itself.
While email is widely considered to still be one of the best marketing tools,
and is still a huge part of how people communicate every day, it does have its
limitations. Microsoft is hoping to solve some of these limitations with its
Active Views platform. Those taking
advantage of the platform will be able to deliver users email that stays fresh.
Microsoft's Dick Craddock
explains, "One challenge is that the
content [of general email] is static, so when you open the email, the content
may already be out of date. Additionally, most of these messages require you to
click out of them to the sender�s website in order to complete a key action or
take the next step. In some cases, this works just fine, but it can become a
hassle, especially if you're trying to get through your inbox quickly. You might
want to check out that online deal, update your account, respond to a friend
request, or browse products, but simply don�t because of the extra time it
requires. With the average person receiving more than 200 email messages per
week (outside of work), the extra time adds up, and our research shows that
about 70% of people who use email regularly think that getting through their
inbox takes too long."
Enter Active Views' features that let users interact from inside the email
itself.
"These enhancements haven't happened before today due to security concerns by
email services," explains Craddock. "There has simply been no way to run
JavaScript code within email messages in such a way that it's isolated and not
allowed to do malicious things on your computer. Hotmail is solving this problem
with its new Active Views platform, technology that allows senders to run code
securely in their email messages. It protects you AND gives you access to
information on the sender�s website through forms and inline actions built
directly into the email itself. This keeps the content up to date and provides a
more engaging and time-saving experience."
Monster.com and Orbitz are the first to partner with Microsoft on the
initiative. Users will be able to book travel arrangements and look for jobs
from within the emails. Microsoft suggests things like managing your Netflix
account or accepting LinkedIn invitations from within an email as future
possibilities.
Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft can't agree on much, and you might imagine that
tossing some politicians into the situation wouldn't help, but a common goal's
come to light. These companies, along with many others and the Obama
administration, intend to stop illegal online pharmacies from doing business.
William McQuillen reported today that a
group including American Express, GoDaddy, Google, MasterCard, Microsoft, PayPal,
Visa, and Yahoo is "helping to establish a nonprofit organization targeting
illegal Internet pharmacies in support of Obama administration efforts,
according to the White House Office of Management and Budget."
Victoria Espinel, the White House intellectual property coordinator, explained,
"It's important that we act aggressively now before it snowballs into a bigger
problem."
And indeed, "aggressive" is a good way to describe the group of corporations
that's been assembled. The resources at their disposal are just about
limitless, and the vast majority of Internet users must encounter at least one
of their properties on a daily basis.
It might not take much convincing to get the companies to cooperate, either. A
dead user can't click on ads, after all, and even setting aside Darwin Award
nominees who buy toxic "V!@gr@," Google and the other companies should
appreciate being safer from litigious drugmakers' lawsuits.
We'll be sure to keep an eye on this coalition's actions over time.
Brace yourself for another round of rumors about acquisitions, partnerships, and
funding possibilities. Steve Ballmer and Dick Costolo supposedly met for
breakfast this week, and it's a rare person who will imagine all they discussed
was the fat content of donuts.
To be fair: no one's claimed that they observed the CEOs of Microsoft and
Twitter signing a single document or even talking shop. Plus, the source of the
rumor hasn't been cited.
Victoria Barret just wrote, "This just
heard: Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer had breakfast this week in San
Francisco with Twitter's Dick Costolo, who recently took over the top dog spot
from co-founder Evan Williams."
Still, there's reason to believe something significant could have happened.
Bing announced a search deal with Twitter before Google, after all, and
yesterday, one Microsoft exec had no problem admitting that his company once
tried to buy Facebook.
It's a simple fact that Microsoft isn't short on cash, either.
We'll see what happens. A colleague did spot the fail whale earlier today, so
perhaps Twitter could use some of Microsoft's technical expertise.
Last month, Groupon reportedly demonstrated to Google that not everything's for
sale, and it's now more certain than ever that Facebook did the same thing to
Microsoft a few years ago. A Microsoft exec confirmed this morning that his
company once tried to acquire Facebook.
Fritz Lanman, Senior Director of Corporate Strategy and Acquisitions at
Microsoft, didn't make any effort to cover up the attempt, and there was no
misinterpreting his words, according to
Alexia Tsotsis. At LeWeb 2010, Lanman
simply said during an onstage interview, "Yeah, we tried to acquire Facebook."
By way of explanation - or perhaps just as a random observation - Lanman then
added, "Facebook had a lot of similarities to Microsoft back in the day."
Those statements are sure to get more than a few investors thinking. Microsoft
shareholders may wince at the thought of the great opportunity the company was
denied. Facebook backers, meanwhile, are liable to start seeing more dollar
signs than ever before.
Anyway, Microsoft at least managed to trade $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake
in Facebook back in 2007, as we all know.
That investment seems to have worked out for both companies as they've
occasionally chosen to integrate products and services in the subsequent years.
Bing has made added some enhancements to Bing Shopping with the goal of making
it easier for people to browse merchandise by category and sub-category, or as
Bing describes it, by "browsing visual aisles like you would in the
real-world".
I don't know if it's quite the same as walking through a brick and mortar store,
but it does seem to be easier to browse merchandise at a more specific category
level. "Bing shopping now makes it easier to browse with product images and
easy-to-use filters that let you browse across thousands of different
categories," Bing
says.
In the navigation column on the left, users will see lists of product
categories. "Whether you're looking to browse by style, price, brand or type,
we've got you covered," Bing says. It would be nice if size was included for
things like shoes and clothing, but that appears to be missing (at least in the
searches I conducted).
Still, the new set-up is pretty helpful, and certainly an improvement.
This isn't the only enhancement Bing has made to Bing Shopping this week. They
also
added the addition of shareable shopping lists
that allow user to show their Facebook friends what they're thinking about
buying, and ask for feedback. Another practical use is to share a Christmas list
with family.
If you want to see a demo of how the new category navigation works, you can see
a video on Bing's blog
here, but it's pretty self-explanatory,
and you'll probably get more out of just messing around with it yourself.
� Federal Agency Moves Email Completely to Cloud with Google
The United States
General Services Administration (GSA) is
moving 17,000 employees and contractors to Google Apps for Government,
reportedly replacing their use of several different versions of IBM's Lotus
Notes and Domino Software. Microsoft isn't thrilled.
"Though Microsoft is disappointed in the GSA�s internal email decision, the news
underscores how robust competition is today, not only between Microsoft and
Google, but also Cisco, IBM, VMWare and many others," a spokesperson for the
company tells WebProNews. "Industry competition drives innovation and is good
for government agencies � and we continue to see many federal, state & local
governments choosing Microsoft to meet their business needs. California,
Minnesota and New York City are the latest governments to select Microsoft�s
Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) to host cloud-based email."
By switching to Google Apps, the GSA is actually becoming the first federal
agency to move email to the cloud agency-wide, which is likely to become a much
more common trend moving forward.
"Cloud computing has a demonstrated track record of cost savings and
efficiencies," said Casey Coleman, GSA Chief Information Officer.
"GSA's decision to switch to Google Apps resulted from a competitive request for
proposal (RFP) process that took place over the past six months, during which
the agency evaluated multiple proposals for replacing their existing on-premises
email system,"
explains Mike Bradshaw, Director of
Google's Federal Enterprise team. "GSA selected Google partner Unisys as the
prime contractor to migrate all employees in 17 locations around the world to an
integrated, flexible and robust email and collaboration service in 2011."
"By making this switch, GSA will benefit in a number of ways," adds Bradshaw.
"Modern email and collaboration tools will help make employees more efficient
and effective. Google Apps will bring GSA a continual stream of new and
innovative features, helping the agency keep pace with advances in technology in
the years ahead. And taxpayers will benefit too�by reducing the burden of
in-house maintenance and eliminating the need to replace hardware to host its
email systems, GSA expects to lower costs by 50 percent over the next five
years."
Google recently
expanded Google Apps to include most of
the company's services.
Th GSA expects to save $15 million over five years, by moving email to the
cloud.
WebProNews sat down with
Derrick Wheeler, Senior SEO Architect at Microsoft
to talk about large scale SEO and how Microsoft manages SEO across it's huge
multi-business, global website.
Chances are you don't have a site that matches the size of what Microsoft has,
but in the age of realtime user-generated content, there is a whole lot of
content going up on the web. Wheeler (and ultimately Microsoft's) strategy deals
with "mega" sites.
"It's a large complicated website where the content is generated by multiple
business units in many different countries in many different languages, and
you're trying to get things done within a complex, large organization, where
there's just a lot of dependencies - a lot of stakeholders - a lot of different
interests," explains Wheeler.
"A lot of people talk about 'content is king. content is king,' says Wheeler.
"With 'mega SEO,' structure is king because without structure, your content
won't even be discovered."
I'd still recommend producing great content, but when you're talking about a
site the size of Microsoft.com, Wheeler has a point.
"Some of the situations with our site, Microsoft.com...we'll have one million
pages of navigation to get to fourteen thousand pages of content, and the way
that you get to that content determines the URL of the final landing page, so
every final landing page of content will have however many different ways there
are of getting to it duplicated, so you know, you've got like twenty million
URLs just for fourteen thousand pages," he says. "So a lot of mega SEO is about
crawl efficiency - making your site more efficient for crawling and indexing."
"One of the things that we deal with are the crawler efficiencies - things like
large scale duplicate content or just junk content - outdated content - content
that's been up for like five years, but the person that managed it left the
company and no one took over so there's just content sitting out there that
engines have to index," he continues. "We don't want that stuff surfacing. We
want our new stuff, so getting rid of legacy content, trying to fix things at
the platform level, so you don't continue to make the same mistakes over and
over and over or just build on the issues that you have with your existing
content management system."
"But one of our challenges is we have multiple content management systems," he
adds. "We've got one primary for one section, another section of the site might
have two or three that they use. I mean it's basically all over the board."
"I can't just go in and fix the CMS and have everything magically fixed. We have
to go in and prioritize what CMS we want to try to work with," he adds.
How do you deal with that? Turn to the IT guys of course.
"MSIT was involved with that - our IT department," says Wheeler. "They can tell
when the content that hadn't been updated in a certain amount of time and then
they reached out to who were listed as the owners of that section and they
contacted them and asked them if they still needed that content, and if there
was no response in a certain amount of time, they would just remove it. And if
they did respond then they would work out whether or not this content was still
valid, and if it wasn't then they all agreed that it would be removed."
"It was a lot of email chains that I was on," he adds. "Hundreds of emails back
and fourth to get all this accomplished, and I think they removed probably a
million, two million URLs from the site just by that one exercise."
Penalties? For Microsoft?
"A lot of these pages of content weren't getting any traffic," Wheeler notes.
"That was another way that we could tell that they were not really useful....We
didn't go in and manually map them to any other section of the site."
You might think search engines would penalize you for having 2 million URLs that
go nowhere, but when you're Microsoft, that's not something you really need to
worry about (and it's not like Google would treat the competition unfairly).
"I don't think an engine is going to dock us for having pages of content that
were really old and not updated and removing them from our website, and the
proper response for a page that no longer exists is the 404," says Wheeler. "I
don't think that they would penalize us for that. I'm pretty sure of it."
"We could've gone in probably and found some that were valuable and redirected
them somewhere, but in general, our site has a lot of authority just because
when we launch something, we get a ton of links," he says. "You know, people -
bloggers are always talking about Microsoft and all the stuff that we're doing.
Our site in general has a lot of authority, so it wasn't a big priority for us
at the time."
For "mega" sites, this is probably the case a lot of times.
Small Strides For a Big Impact
When you're talking about a site the size of Microsoft.com, there are other
things besides irrelevant content that are likely to come into play. "That's
just one aspect of mega SEO," says Wheeler. "The other would be the
international piece - it's huge for us, because we have close to a hundred
different countries and many different languages, and there's 23 countries that
we really focus a lot on, but our content - the way we publish it
basically...for Australia, their content can be in a lot of different places
scattered all over our website, and it's hard for them to manage their SEO when
their content's spread all over the place."
"So one of the things we've tried to do is come up with a standard international
URL policy, because without that, it's hard for a country to even manage their
own content," he says. "Event that's been a battle because some of the content
management systems that we publish on can't conform to that structure so it's
just a constant....with mega SEO it's about making small strides over time that
[when] grouped together they have a really big impact."
Who's in Charge of the Whole Site?
It's Just Ballmer.
"There's so many different business groups and our website Microsoft.com doesn't
roll up to a single person until it gets to Steve Ballmer," says Wheeler. "As
soon as you break off of Steve Ballmer, you've got someone else that's
responsible for MSDN TechNet. There's another business group that's responsible
for the support site...so we don't have a centralized authority that manages the
entire Microsoft.com domain. So it's very difficult because some businesses will
make decisions on what's in their best interest, and it might not really be
what's in the best interest of our site as a single domain name."
"The first thing I did was really try to draw an image (because I'm very visual)
of what are all the pieces involved in order to optimize the site," says Wheeler
of his approach. "And for us...there's four levels of where the SEO occurs on
the site, and to support those four levels, there's a lot of what we'll call
workstreams or initiatives or focus areas that support those four levels."
SEO by Level
"The first level is the site-wide SEO," explains Wheeler. "That's the crawl
efficiency stuff we talked about. The next level is subsidiary level SEO, which
is the international piece and working with them."
"The next is what we call site-specific so there might be an individual site on
Microsoft.com - they want to do SEO...well we have three levels and they can do
it themselves and we provide guidance, they can do a little bit with an agency
(just have the agency do the keyword research, do some training...), or they can
do a full service agency program," he continues. "And then there's the people
who say, 'I want to optimize this page for this keyword'. Well, we'll give them
some generic advice like, 'you should use that word on your page and you should
actually think [about] more than just that page and on board to one of our
site-specific programs.'"
How Do You Measure All of This?
"And then in support of that we have a standard measurement framework, because
when I got there, there was a lot of different ways that people were measuring
SEO," he says. "In fact, our site in general...half the site uses one web
analytics application, the other half uses another, and some of them are tagged
with both."
"Just getting all the metrics is a challenge," Wheeler adds. "And then we also
have search technology that needs to scale for all four levels. We've got our
own set of web crawlers set up to crawl our site to look for those big issues,
and we can also crawl individual sites and tell them where their SEO problems
are."
Gathering the Masses
"We work with agencies, vendors...anything we can to help us scale this out,"
says Wheeler. "We had a two-day Microsoft-only SEO Summit called XMS (which is
SMX backwards), but stands for cross-Microsoft. We had over 560 attendees that
were all Microsoft people. We had all Microsoft speakers, which I thought was
incredible that one company could have 560 attendees to an internal SEO event,
and the entire event cost seventeen thousand dollars for 560 people. Now if we
sent them all to a conference like [PubCon], that would be like 560 thousand
dollars plus travel."
"And it was Microsoft-specific...all of the content was targeted towards
Microsoft websites and out of that, we found a lot of internal 'SEO rock stars'
that I can start building relationships with, and they're great evangelists
across the company."
As you can see, "mega SEO" is no minor feat. How would you like to have
Wheeler's job? We also
talked with Bill Hunt of Back Azimuth
Consulting at PubCon about the challenges of big company SEO. These companies
may get a lot of links and rankings, but it's not exactly easy.
It's getting to be that time of year. December is just around the corner then a
new year will sneak up on us quickly.
Bing sent us its lists of top searches
and top people searches for the year 2010.
The lists illustrate a (possibly unhealthy) obsession with celebrities. "While
Michael Jackson was number one and topical items like Swine Flu and Stock Market
appeared in the top 10 in 2009, the tables have turned this year, with 2010
reflecting the growing appetite for celebrity news," a representative for Bing
tells WebProNews.
The top ten overall searches in
2010 on Bing have been:
1) Kim Kardashian
2) Sandra Bullock
3) Tiger Woods
4) Lady Gaga
5) Barack Obama
6) Hairstyles
7) Kate Gosselin
8) Walmart
9) Justin Bieber
10) free
Similarly, the top people searches
have been:
1) Kim Kardashian
2) Sandra Bullock
3) Tiger Woods
4) Lady Gaga
5) Barack Obama
6) Kate Gosselin
7) Justin Bieber
8) Jesse James
9) Lindsay Lohan
10) Jennifer Aniston
11) Michael Jackson
"This year�s #1 searched for topic on Bing.com was Kim Kardashian, who won top
searched by a landslide � with 20% more searches than #2 Sandra Bullock," the
rep says. "In fact, 2009 top searched Michael Jackson dropped to the #11
position for most popular people searched on Bing in 2010, and the only repeat
top 10 searched item was Kate Gosselin (last year�s #8) � although this year she
appeared alone � minus Jon."
"The struggling economy is also reflected in this year's top searches, with
discount retailer Walmart and the topic 'free' appearing in the top 10," she
points out.
We'll no doubt start seeing similar lists pop up soon from other search
providers, and then we can compare the user bases for each. I'm guessing that
they won't be incredibly different. It will be particularly interesting to
compare those from Bing users and Yahoo users, given that Bing is now providing
Yahoo's results.
I find it a little interesting that "hairstyles" came in at number 6 on Bing's
overall list among so many celebrities. Could it be related to Kim Kardashian
(Kim Kardashian hairstyles a suggestion for the 'kim kardashian'
query). Thoughts? Please share.
Update: A Microsoft
spokesperson tells us, "Hairstyles made the top 10 list because people were
searching for everything from celebrity hairstyles to special occasion styles to
styles by hair type. Celebrities influenced the styles, with short cuts on
newbie Carey Mulligan and the classic Halle Berry trending in the hairstyle
searches. Although hair is of interest year-round, summer appeared to be the
time when new hairstyle exploration gained momentum."
Google TV, Hulu Plus, and Netflix may have a serious new competitor in the
making. Rumor has it that Microsoft is developing an online TV service of its
own, and that Microsoft intends to use the Xbox to ensure the service is
available to a very large audience.
Yinka Adegoke wrote earlier this
morning, "Microsoft Corp has held talks with media companies to license TV
networks for a new online pay-television subscription service through devices
such as its Xbox video game console, two people familiar with the plans told
Reuters."
Assuming things continue to move forward, this could go a number of ways.
Adegoke wrote, "The maker of the Windows operating system has proposed a range
of possibilities in these early talks including creating a 'virtual cable
operator' . . . ."
Then another possibility is the sort of "a la carte" cable channel selection
many people have desired for years.
In any event, plenty of people already own Xboxes, which could give Microsoft's
service one advantage over its rivals. Toss in the corporation's considerable
financial resources, and it's easy to imagine one or more ad campaigns making
the online TV service highly visible, as well.
Adegoke's sources imagined the launch of Microsoft's service might occur in 12
or so months. We'll see what happens.