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YouTube Pre-Monsoon Clouds in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, INDIA June 2009
June 18th, 2009
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Archive for June, 2009
Microsoft Corp’s Bing search engine won more market share from rivals last week, according to new industry data released on Wednesday, but still trails Google Inc and Yahoo Inc.
Challenging market leader Google — which in turn is looking to break into Microsoft’s core software market — is a long-term project, said Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer.
“We have had some very good initial response,” Ballmer said at a conference in Detroit. “I don’t want to over-set expectations. We are going to have to be tenacious and keep up the pace of innovation over a long period of time.”
Microsoft grabbed 12.1 percent of U.S. Internet searches for the work week June 8-12, according to data released by industry tracker comScore earlier on Wednesday.
That is up from 11.3 percent in the June 1-5 period — the week in which Bing was launched — and up from 9.1 percent the week before that.
For comparison, Google got 65 percent of U.S. searches in May, the last full month for which figures are available, followed by Yahoo with 20.1 percent and Microsoft with 8 percent.
Analysts and investors are keenly awaiting data for all of June to see if Microsoft can hold onto early gains.
Ballmer acknowledged the tough task of beating Google, which he referred to as “a big dog competitor.”
The world’s largest software company has long been determined to play a major role in the lucrative Web search market after watching upstart Google take a stranglehold.
At the same time, Google is looking to take advantage of its popularity to launch software that competes with Microsoft’s, which has created a new source of tension between the two companies.
Microsoft ratcheted up that tension on Wednesday by claiming that Google’s new Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook software — which allows users to share data between their Outlook e-mail and Google’s online offerings — disables a key function in Outlook.
“The installation of the Google Apps Sync plugin disables Outlook’s ability to search any and all of your Outlook data,” Outlook product manager Dev Balasubramanian wrote on a Microsoft blog. “It is also important to note that uninstalling the plugin may not fix the issue.”
The problem, though relatively unimportant to users, represents a crucial struggle between Microsoft and Google for e-mail customers.
Google’s new product allows business users to continue using Outlook for email and other tasks, but the back-end functionality and data storage moves to Google, instead of residing on a company’s internal servers running Microsoft software.
Google acknowledged the Outlook problem identified by Microsoft, and several other issues where its software does not mesh well with others.
“We’re working with Microsoft and other partners to help fix these issues and support additional Outlook features like multiple calendars,” said Google Apps senior product manager Chris Vander Mey in a blog post. “We’ll keep you posted on our progress.”
Microsoft shares closed up just less than 1 percent at $23.68, while Google’s fell 0.2 percent to $415.16, both on Nasdaq.
June 18th, 2009
MySpace, the social network owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, said it will cut 30 percent of its staff to lower costs as it struggles to stay popular in the face of rising competition. MySpace will be left with about 1,000 employees, it said in a statement released on Tuesday. The company declined to say how many people work at the service, but the percentage suggests that about 400 people will lose their jobs.
The cuts, which were presaged in several blog reports in recent weeks, are the biggest move so far by new management at the social network and an attempt, it said, to return the service to a “start-up culture.” “Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered by our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company,” MySpace’s new chief executive, Owen Van Natta, said in the statement. “I understand that these changes are painful for many. They are also necessary for the long-term health and culture of MySpace.” News Corp named Van Natta as CEO in April. He replaced Chris DeWolfe, one of MySpace’s co-founders. News Corp’s new digital media chief, Jonathan Miller, said MySpace “grew too big considering the realities of today’s marketplace.” The layoffs will happen across MySpace’s operations, though many of its employees are based in Los Angeles. A company spokeswoman declined to say when employees will learn that they are losing their jobs.
MySpace is facing increasing competition from social network Facebook. Facebook and Twitter, a website that lets people tell others what they’re doing, are surpassing MySpace in buzz and popularity in the technology and media worlds. The job cuts came the same week as the number of Facebook users in the United States surpassed those of MySpace for the first time, according to Web measurement company comScore. Facebook’s edge was narrow, with 70,278,000 unique visitors to its website in May versus MySpace’s 70,237,000. Still, the change marks a key triumph for Facebook. MySpace’s U.S. user numbers have fallen since October 2008. Worldwide, Facebook had more than 307 million unique visitors in April, according to comScore, the latest month for which data was available. MySpace had more than 123 million. MySpace forms a large part of Fox Interactive Media, a News Corp unit that houses several of the company’s digital operations. The unit, which people in the media business call “FIM,” recently called off a move into a large office building in Playa Vista in Los Angeles. MySpace also is facing the likelihood that an advertising deal with Google Inc that brought it $300 million a year over three years will be renegotiated on terms that will be far less lucrative to the social network when the original contract expires in 2010.
June 17th, 2009
