Three random updates: Bing, iPhones, and Dropbox

On Microsoft’s Bing what’s new in web search: By all accounts, Microsoft has a success with its re-crafted bing search site. I posted something about it mainly to say, competition can re-emerge even in a market as dominated as web search. With the follow-on Microsoft-Yahoo deal, bing on TV, and all the rest, bing + Yahoo + related now can claim almost third of the search marketplace to google’s almost two thirds, with others nestled in there in single digits.

How good is bing? Or, how good is it for you? Here is a great site for doing a “blind taste test” style search comparison among google, bing and yahoo. http://blindsearch.fejus.com/. Its beta, but it’s fun.

On Apple and the hole it is digging for itself by stridently controlling iPhone software: I wrote about this on idealware recently. The iPhone App Store saga has really emerged as a major business news story for the summer. Apple finally conceded a more standard version of Gmail for the iPhone (one with email push out to the phone). The fact that these developments are covered like the daily sports says a lot. Here is a great run-down of some of the reaction to Apple’s brinksmanship on the iPhone.

The stickiness of this story reflects an important development of wider significance. Having changed the game in audio and mobile devices, consumers expect more and different of it. Sure, part of it is pressure to be more responsive on price. What is really fascinating is how much the pressure is about being more open, as in open source/open content. Compared to the beginning of this decade, having great design is not enough.

We are really in a new era in which “pure” Open Source software has given way to much more of a continuum between being completely closed, proprietary, license-driven and being completely open. And Apple is catching it as much as Microsoft, Oracle and other hold-outs of the last decade. Its about as likely that iTunes be open sourced as Windows, yet the issues of intellectual property, “walled gardens” of controlled add-ons, DRM and so on have become part of much wider social awareness and consumer thinking. This is a good thing for software and technology development generally.

On drop box. When I wrote about dropbox last spring, I really was just looking for something to keep home and work computers in sync. Start with a free Dropbox account and create folders on Windows, Mac or Linux computers (including servers) that will dynamically sync the files, simple as that. I am seeing now just how useful Dropbox really is.

First, it offers another piece in the project management, project planning puzzle. You can share a sub-folder of your drop box with a project team for working collaborative on documents. You can do this in a larger way with Basecamp, Sharepoint, Microsoft Office Live, a Google site and others. What’s nice about Dropbox is that setting up the sharing is really light-weight and easy where collaboration is short-term, project-specific, and not particularly staff-based. It is easy and free to get an account, and it only takes a minute to share out a folder for a team. You are still working in your standard desktop office applications. Yes, the documents are on their server, so there is that Web 2.0 trust factor, but they are also always on your computer. And the web interface includes revisions and other features in simple format.

The other thing I have been thinking about with dropbox is drop box as a full back-up alternative. The free version allows 2 GB of storage. If that doesn’t cover your current, active documents and more, then you lead a different life than me. Moving up, the price for 50GB and beyond, and is more than, say, Mozy or Cabonite, but reasonable enough to consider using it to back up everything. I don’t think I would even true to have it back-up Exchange Server, but I have been playing around with ways to ensure it will back-up active shared files (such as a database). Check it out at getdropbox.com or use this link, and yes, help me get even more storage free! https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTU4MjExMTk.

Dropbox seems like an ambitious small company. Hope they survive.

Bing hits search market

I tried Bing this morning and it’s not bad. Not bad at all. Bing.com is Microsoft’s new search site, soft-launched in “preview,” full launch June 4.

As I felt about its predecessor Live Search incarnations, I thought I would just say Bing stands for “BING is not Google,” as others have said. Not so fast. Bing surprises. It returns results very quickly, including on Firefox and Opera. It also has a fresh, enticing look and operation. For example, I really like the clickable bar to the right of each search result; roll over it, and a Flash-like popup gives more detail without navigating the full page.

And the results show a lot of smarts to them. I did a few comparison searches on Google and Bing, found them interesting and not entirely the same in a useful way.

I’m sold. Partly. I’m not ready to give up Google as my default search. I’m too used to the way it works, how to bend it toward the kinds of results that suit me. That said, I’m probably going to be likely going forward to supplement an important search with Bing at this point. Yup, keep using delicious and other social networking search sites, and for general search, I expect I will compare Bing and Google. (You can easily add Bing to the search option list in Firefox with a link at top of page.)

If you create an account, Bing will remember your results and also allow you to have a “cashback” account for using recommended Bing vendor partners. Hmm. I don’t know what I think about this from a privacy point of view or a business model point of view. As we all know, however, Google doesn’t provide search results as a community service either.

As far as advanced search syntax, some of it is like Google and for some of it, you need to read the help pages to understand it all. Some of the Bing-specific options seem pretty cool, and I look forward to getting used to them. I did miss being able to search by date, though maybe that’s coming when the site fully launches.

From a policy point of view, I’m glad Bing has launched. We need more competition in software systems, including in something as basic as web search. A year ago, Tim O’Reilly (of O’Reilly Media) argued that the battle for search had ended and everyone should just let Google have it.

A year later, there is more life in search than in a while, including with Twitter emerging as a new meta-search mechanism, and new ideas about how search should work in the future. Today Google has 64% of the search market, Yahoo has 20% and Microsoft (with its older sites) has only 8%. And according to the WSJ , Microsoft’s own research shows 60% of users are happy with their current search tools. That said, given Google and Yahoo’s pervasiveness, and how important search is, 40% not happy is a lot of folks thinking they might do better with something new. 2/3 of online purchases begin on a search page. Given how much revenue this represents, both from the sales themselves and from advertising, the software titans have strong interest in
innovating.

And Google quietly has added some new search features recently. When you get a result page, check out the “show options” link at the top to quickly refine your results. I like that too.

From a developer point of view, yes, I admit there is something appealing about having to worry about fewer development frameworks and APIs. If Bing grows, complexity grows again for web developers. That’s life for folks like us.

Yet, from a small business and nonprofit organization point of view, innovation at the top creates a climate of innovation up and down the software food chain. For example, there has a new wave of consolidation in commercial software for nonprofits lately. This wave appears bringing clearer support and stronger feature sets. Meanwhile, there has been a lot of innovation on the open source side, as Idealware.org’s recent twin reports on open source content management systems for web sites and on low cost donor databases have shown. Think about which of these trends helps more in making good choices or getting good prices and definitely give Bing a try this week.

Full disclosure: Steve often uses Microsoft software, and some of his best friends and family members do as well. He used Bing as well as Google to read news and other comments about bing.com, though "binging" (is that a new 2.0 word?) was not as easy as googling bing.