Now, enter Microsoft.

Google vs Apple in 2010

There are unconfirmed reports that Bing may become the default search engine for Iphone. The World is changing. Isn’t it?

With Google and Apple exchanging body blows become the superpowers of the mobile  web. Here is a list of the things i foresee in the next couple of years.

• Android based phone become a major threat to the autocracy of Apple Iphone. The SDK for Iphone is available for only limited audience. I think, that is a major turn off.
• Barring Microsoft’s Pink Phone project, I see Microsoft becoming a major partner of Apple in providing enterprise applications (Office suite) to Apple products.
• Bing gaining a decent market share for searches through the Mobile web.
• Apple Mac-books remain limited to the limited audience and is further killed by the upcoming Google Chrome OS. Windows remains the mainstream OS.
• Apple using some new shitty policy to take on Admob.
• Google taking on Apple by adding multi-touch and then fighting the patent battle with Apple. Google have the money to do it and they must. (Update -- Nexus One now officially supports Multitouch i.e the much famed pinch to zoom.)

With Apple coming out with its tablet (unconfirmed reports), making Bing the  default search for Iphones in the next couple of days and Amazon starting to project Kindle as a platform for developers, Google may have found its big partner in Amazon. There lies a big battle ahead for us.I am slightly bent towards Google on this, but at the end of the day all I want is a free super phone, which makes up for the cost by serving ads.

Let the wars begin.

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So, We will start with Google,I mean Search.

Search : Bing is not Google, and that is the verdict. Even Bing realizes the same. While presenting Visual Search at TechCrunch 50, they did go on to say when the market leader is as far ahead as Google, there is no point competing. Trying to explore niche areas like visual search made more sense. A statement pretty similar in attitude to Google’s releasing their Chrome OS only for netbooks.

I just get to the right result by Googling it. There was a lot of hype when Microsoft struck a deal with Yahoo for providing their search results. The process is still on, but the result hasn’t exactly been the way Microsoft or Yahoo may have hoped it to be. While Google’s market share didn’t take a hit, it has been Yahoo’s market share which has been eaten into by Bing. Both Google and Bing have struck deals with Twitter to crawl status updates. Bing has already launched its Twitter search at http://www.bing.com/twitter but I have not been able to understand why I should use this instead of real time Twitter search at search.twitter.com . Google’s social search is also far from what we all expected it to be showing only the stuff written by your different friends.

Things to look out for in the near future:

• How Google and Bing include Twitter status updates in their search results?
• Bing is said to have stuck a deal with Facebook, and will hence be able to include Facebook status updates in it. There is a lot of information out there on Facebook.
• Once Yahoo search is powered by Bing, the market-share of Bing will take a big leap. Being on the Yahoo homepage will be a huge boost.
• Negative publicity like Rupert Mudroch not giving out news to Google (hilarious) and Microsoft (mentioned at most places as Bing trying to buy News) trying to trigger the same will not help Bing in any way.
• Realtime searches like OneRiot, SocialMention etc are doing a decent job as far as social media is concerned.

Overall, Google has a huge advantage in this sector,not only because of the results they churn out but also because of the goodwill they have earned. Also, innovation through the various Labs feature always keeps the users interested in Google.

EMail Service: It did not take long for Twitter to go overcapacity when Gmail services  went down for an hour this year. That is extent to which Gmail is being used by the casual email users.

All this and more, Gmail remains the fastest growing emailing service but in terms of market-share there is still some distance to cover.

Although, Gmail has some of the most amazing features thanks mainly to their lab features, but emails have been there for ages and Yahoo and AOL are difficult to replace. The fact that most computers run on Windows and Office dominates the document creation space helps Microsoft’s cause further. The fact that Gmail does go down every now and then has also made the corporates jittery about moving to Gmail. Giving out a package of standard google apps with 50 email IDs free is definitely helping Google’s cause.

Email is being challenged by a lot of technologies like Google very wave, the multiple social networks, threadsy and much more. But, I don’t think email is going to die that quickly. Google is trying to innovate its way into this space but the traditional giants still seem to hold strong.

IM Services: IM services have come a long way from IRC chats to the super hyped Google Wave. IM’s have evolves to VOIP’s where Skype leads the pack by a huge margin, owing to its brilliant quality. We couldn’t find any updated report on the market share of IM services, with most mailing services allowing chat within the browsers. There has been a lot of innovation in the IM services with Gmail even allowing a video chat within the browser. However, this traditional IM market seems to be still dominated by Microsoft, AOL etc.

Facebook has also introduced an IM service within the browser (a crappy one at that) and it is to be seen what impact it has on the IM marketshare’s.

Look out for:

• Google Wave takes collaborative chatting to the next level(real time) and hence can have a major impact on the market.
• Services like meebo and imo.im have been doing a brilliant job of combining all the services in one go.
• AOL’s integration of Twitter can have an impact on the IM marketshare too.

IM Services are moving on at a rapid pace from being personal messaging systems to being collaborative tools and innovations will be required to march ahead. As of now, Microsoft seems to hold a slight advantage with its loyal group of MSN users, but I must say Google is coming.

The next post in this series will cover areas like Browsers, Online Collaboration, The Social Space,Photo sharing and Video Sharing space and some other innovations taken up by these tech giants. Keep watching this space for the remaining part of the coverage.

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IS YAHOO REALTIME SEARCH = YAHOO + ONERIOT PARTNERSHIP ?

According to a recent TechCrunch (TC) report, Yahoo is looking set to follow Bing and Google in launching real-time search across its seach engine platform. TC further has speculated Yahoo to partner OneRiot, a realtime search engine provider to fulfil its ambitions. If it does so it will clearly deviate from the model followed by Bing and Google of tying up with social media sites like facebook and twitter.

YAHOO’S COMMENT

However when approached by press for a comment on its speculated partnership with OneRiot Yahoo refused to respond. It said

“We can’t comment on rumor or speculation. Real-time search is important and we’re currently conducting several tests designed to discover if showing such content is useful to people using Yahoo Search. Yahoo is focused on creating the most innovative, easy-to-use and valuable search experience for people, and after these tests we will carefully evaluate whether we should integrate such results for everyone using Yahoo Search.”

WEB 2.0 RULES

Social media or web 2.0 as its popularly called is really the domain which will drive the internet space in the new age. Whichever player Bing (Microsoft), Google or Yahoo manages to get its hold on real time search will be able to leverage the growing social media sphere to become the next generation web leader. Any idea Bing, Google or Yahoo, who it is going to be ?

MS [and for that matter Google too] have made their respective failed attempts to buy out both Twitter and Facebook. While both Twitter and Facebook decided to thrive on their own then, they didn’t mind the cash inflow this time around by making available the vast real time updates they have at their disposal. Even as Twitter CEO Evans Williams humorously downplayed questions regarding this deal (a day earlier at the Web 2.0 summit), Microsoft’s online services group President Qi Lu went on to explain the deal, a deal that MS likes to call “Bing Wave 2″.  Lu said the deal with their other prospective partner, Facebook, will come in at a later point. Excerpts from his interview here and a conversation with ‘O Reilly here.

The official Bing-Twitter Integration is up and live at http://www.bing.com/twitter, for the US only (so change your country preference to US  to check it out). It has a tag cloud showing the hottest topics on twitter (similar to Twitter’s trending topics) and also sample tweets on each of them.When we actually make a particular query, we get the tweets in two categories ‘Most recent’ and ‘Best match’. The Tweets corresponding to the search tag are supposedly updated in real time (but when we checked it out, didn’t quite find it to be so!!). This is just a basic setup live and should get more compact/trendy and feature laden with time. A snapshot :

The deal in itself is huge (and we are not talking in just financial terms here, infact Qi Lu passed the question when asked about the Financial terms of the deal), taking ‘Search’ on to the real time corridors.The deal gives MS, the access to full (public) Twitter data feed. This, for sure, is a formidable blow to its arch-rival Google. Twitter too has been looking at options recently for some revenue generation. This deal (and the upcoming one with Google) should suffice for some time now. The other options (read ads) is a scary one in itself.!! If the deal with Twitter is big, that with Facebook is going to be bigger, what with the 45 million status updates per day from 30 million unique visitors.

While all this does sound great, the question to be asked is : “Isnt this at some point the invasion of  user privacy?“. The question holds less of a significance with respect to Twitter (considering that its user’s tweets are more in the public domain), but gets pretty significant in the context of Facebook (whose users want to share those updates only amongst their friends). News has it that Facebook is going to provide its users with options in this regard. Wonder how this entire deal looks  in the light of Twitter’s user friendly TOS (Terms of Service) that says -- users very much own their Tweets. So what if MS starts Archiving these tweet streams. Facebook have anyways a non-friendly TOS (as per which, Facebook can use/modify/publish  your status updates and that too even after you terminate your account!!). Probably the Bing-Facebook integration will further fuel the issue. So are the users ready to let these giants invade their privacy (read status updates) for the sake of a perfect real time search? Readers’ opinion solicited.

This has been happening right since the day Bing declared Visual Search, live, during its presentation. I tried it a couple of times before  I finally tweeted to the Bing team about the same. No surprises from Microsoft again.!! It took them over a week to respond, mentioning the problem.  All that I needed to do was  change my country preference in Bing to US. To cut the long story short, Bing Visual Search has been released in the US only. You can change your country preference by clicking on the country name on the Bing Homepage.

It was only so far that I had to go to get the Bing Visual Search to work. However, for me it was one step further. I was on Linux and Bing Visual Search needs Silverlight installed as a pre-requisite. I found a developmental release for the same but couldn’t  get it to work quickly enough. So, I switched to my brother’s machine, to write about Bing. This happened to be a Windows Machine with Silverlight installed.

After successfully crossing all hurdles, I was ready to dissect  Microsoft’s answer to Google. 

Time to check out Bing Visual Search then. So I thought of  visually searching Laptop only to realize that I couldn’t. Right now only, a limited no of featured galleries are provided by Visual Search Galleries Beta. Not allowing this setback to bog me down, I went on to  search for Digital Cameras . Voila! The Bing team gets its first round of applause from the people who were around me for providing a Visual Treat in their Visual Search.

The results were  pretty impressive with a number of links like, “most popular on Bing”, “highest megapixel”  on the left hand side of the page. Filters like “megapixel”, “optical zoom”, brand etc are extremely useful additions to a search engine, atleast usability wise. At the end of it all you do get your  prized camera, with its pricing, reviews and related information, all under one roof.

So Whats the verdict?

First the pros :

• A Visual  treat to say the least. You will get to hear at-least a couple of wows if you check it out in a group of three.
• The concept is brilliant. Microsoft is not attacking Google in its forte, it seems. They are trying to provide a better overall searching experience. And should this be added here -- Bing is the fastest growing search engine.
  
• Getting so much information about the camera of your choice stacked together is a nice experience.

Now the cons :

• Available only for the US. You need to change your country of preference to US.
• Limited number of galleries. Bing needs to add up a lot more galleries very soon, else someone like me will consider it a one time visual experience.
• Comparison between two products, which come up in the same search result, didn’t seem possible. A suggestion from my side to the Bing team.
• SilverLight for Linux ( A demand from my side).
• Sometimes Bing Visual Search seems like  the product comparison sites with a few extra features added  and a couple of existing features removed.

Overall, for me Bing Visual Search is a breath of fresh air in a Google dominated search industry. Good competition may mean better search experience for people like us.

Finally, the microreviews team wishes the Bing Team the very best in its future endeavours.  Hope you guys take Visual search to the next level, where, for atleast a certain number of search based tasks Bing is the first name.

Before MS could soak in what had just hit them, people were already talking: the name is Wave -- Google Wave. At the end of the 80 mins DEMO, 4000 developers stood up and cheered like anything. The applause was compared to the legendary Keynote Address from Jobs himself! Google had so very meticulously planned the Day 2 of its IO -- planned to the very exact minutes. And when you declare in a developer’s forum that the product is going to be Open Source, the applause gets manifold. Wave is developed by a Sydney based Google team of Lars and Jens Ramussen (brothers of the startup Where 2 Tech fame, that later became Google Maps) -- Lead Developers and Stefannie Hannon, Lead PM. At the IO, it was mostly Lars and Stefannie who went through the most of Google Wave. Lars and Stafannie explained Wave in terms of  3 Ps -- the Product, the Platform and the Protocol. Wave the Product Google Wave is supposedly a game changer in the current context of online communication, so much so that the very existence of email as a service is under threat. Wave is a real time Communication platform that combines the email, IM, web chat, social networking and project management. The concurrency in IM/chats is such that you see things appearing character by character! People can join wave midway and still see what the original thread was, thanx to a cool feature like ‘Playback’. Google Wave made simple (watch video)Wave as a product can be embedded in games/blogs/social networks (one can only imagine the impact it will have on the Social Media as a whole). For example a wave embedded in Twitter is a Twave. Every facet of Wave -  the product is sure to mesmerise you. Wave the Platform -- Wave Extensions This is the aspect that the developers were waiting for at the Google IO. And Wave did not disappoint. Google Wave is packaged with a host of APIs like Spelly, Linky, Searchy, Tweety. And the rest are open for the developers to build. This is the aspect of the Wave that is critical to its success. If Wave goes a HIT, it becomes your Twiter/Facebok/gaming client all in one, subsequently opening up the possibility of a whole new application boom in future. Wave the Protocol Google Wave Federation Protocol is an extension to XMPP -- the internet messaging protocol, that has taken the real-time communication to a whole new level. Google Wave as a product is Open Source. Google believes making Wave open like email will only further its cause. Anyone can have their own wave client and still communicate real time to any other Wave network. With a product as ambitious and breathtaking as Wave, either its a total HIT or a bomber. There is no middle path here. Consider when all your friends switch to wave, you simply dont have an option not to. Google has got its first steps right. Now the World awaits its developer’s launch on September 30th. If Wave turns into what it claimed to be at the DEMO, the world is going to change, and change for good. We shall keep you updated with the latest on Wave. And if things go right, we shall give a developer’s perspective to Wave in due time.