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Bing Fails, So Microsoft Proceeds to Anti-competitive Practices

Time
As the world shifts to the Web, Microsoft is running out of time



“It’s not the first entry for Microsoft, They do this about once a year.”

--Google CEO, regarding Bing



Summary: Microsoft's Bing fails to make gains and Microsoft resorts to business as usual

IT WAS more or less clear that Microsoft Bing had failed when an executive quit the team. What remains of this whole gig are some minor gains from an approximately $100,000,000 investment in advertising (paying the press for positive coverage too). According to StatCounter, Microsoft's gains are only a blip on the radar, but press that Microsoft bribed rewarded will likely tell a different story.

Bing: Not Really Gaining on Google



[..]

All the buzz comes from a new search market analysis by Web stats company StatCounter. Bing, the researchers say, secured 8.23 percent of all U.S.-based searches for the month of June. (Bing officially launched on June 3.) The previous month, StatCounter shows Microsoft sitting at 7.81 percent of U.S. searches. That amounts to a month-to-month increase of just under half a percentage point following Bing's debut.


According to the Microsoft/Bing-sponsored press, Bing Travel fell offline after fires. Lack of redundancy did not help (single point of failure). This shows that Microsoft is still unable to serve reliably [1, 2].

A fire last night at Seattle's Fisher Plaza data center has knocked out service to some top Web sites, including Bing Travel and Authorize.net.


Microsoft's attempts to stop Google seem to involve a healthy dose of FUD right now, but there is also vandalism. Here is what the New York Times says about one role of Chrome OS:

What Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, has to fear more than anything else is that he’ll awake one day to learn that the Google search engine suddenly doesn’t work on any Windows computers: something happened overnight and what worked yesterday doesn’t work today. It would have to be an act of deliberate sabotage on Microsoft’s part and blatantly illegal, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. Microsoft would claim ignorance and innocence and take days, weeks or months to reverse the effect, during which time Google would have lost billions.


It is already done with IE6 (see links below). Microsoft is using the operating system to discriminate against Google search, but regulators do nothing about it. Here is another New York Times article about a lawsuit against Google. Microsoft participates in this. It was harassing Google in this case, but nowhere is it mentioned in the report.

The Justice Department confirmed on Thursday that it was conducting an antitrust investigation into the settlement of a lawsuit that groups representing authors and publishers filed against Google.


On a related issue, now that Google enters the sub-notebooks arena, Pamela Jones writes in Groklaw: "I can't help but realize that competing in the netbook space presumably gives them the opportunity to raise antitrust concerns in that space." For details about what Microsoft did, see [1, 2]. Attempts are being made to rewrite the history of GNU/Linux on sub-notebooks.

In addition, on a separate note, Apple and Microsoft are accused of breaking the Web not just by suppressing <video> and <audio> (Google does the very opposite thing, but its take on Ogg Vorbis/Theora as preferred codecs remains ambiguous at best).

Unacceptable Browser HTTP Accept Headers (Yes, You Safari and Internet Explorer)



[...]

The browsing engine most responsible for killing XHTML prefers XHTML over HTML! It would also prefer PNG over HTML. That's a little embarrassing, but what is worse: Safari and Chrome accept XML over HTML (and, ambiguously, over XHTML, too). WebKit's Accept header forces web developers to work against the HTTP spec.


In summary, Microsoft continues to be vicious on the Web, but fortunately enough, Microsoft makes no gains on the Web.

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