Posts Tagged ‘MSN’
Microsoft Makes Gains with Bing Search Engine
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.
Facebook Chat Now Available in Your Favorite IM Client
Even though people send over 2 billion chat messages each day on Facebook Chat, it never really took on Google Talk, Yahoo or MSN for the obvious handicap of it being web-based. No more, Facebook has finally implement Jabber protocol for Chat. Jabber is the same open chat protocol, which runs Google Talk.
You can configure your favorite IM client such as iChat, Pidgin, Adium, Miranda and start chatting with your Facebook buddies without using your web browser or logging into Facebook.com. To learn how to configure your IM client and start chatting, please refer this page.
Those who intend to use Facebook Chat on their websites, mobile or other application, Facebook Connect for developers now supports Facebook Chat as well. AIM is one the first to implement Facebook Chat inside their new chat client. You can download the latest beta version of AIM here.
I think the main reason why Google Talk was so successful was because of its open chat protocol. It was so easy to use, and it was available everywhere. Now, Facebook is trying to do the same. I think it’s a step in the right direction for Facebook.