Fuh-reaking bing

Well, it looks like Yahoo has sold its innards to mickey$oft. Henceforth yahoo search results will be provided by Bing, Microsoft's next attempt to battle google.

I don't really blame Yahoo; they've been in a bad position for a really long time. Before search engines were the demonstratable Right Thing, there were two kinds of "portal" sites:

* search engines: altavista (!), hotbot (!), etc. Remember those? Do you remember when Altavista's boolean searches represented the absolute pinnacle? Nowadays it's mainly remembered as a bit of wordplay by the crack site astalavista. Not going to hotlink that one because it's usually NSFW.

* directories: mainly Yahoo. You submitted your site in a category and real humans verified the placement and published it. This model just doesn't scale in the normal sense. (You could probably scale it by crowdsourcing (having the public verify the info, like Wikipedia or something)). So yahoo left the directory behind and started a half-@ssed attempt to do spidering/search. Never really captured any mental territory.

I've used Bing a few times to see what it's like. It's not completely overhyped and useless.

Because it's there.

Some wundergeeks recently unveiled a couple of early versions of a LiveCD release of Google Android. Early and creaky (and thinks it's a phone), but it boots.

The problem for Micro$oft is that Google has free (admittedly basic) cloud-based documents including word processing, spreadsheets, etc. And now they are toying with free OSes (Chiefly Chrome OS, but also Android as you see above).

All this must be a little scary if your main source of income is selling people a new (versionwise) Office suite and operating system each year or two.

I think that folks are just about ready to realize that the universe does not revolve around Micro$oft. Shades of Galileo, no?