Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing
myprasanna.posterous.com
myprasanna.posterous.com
After all, it's a post about how people who worked tirelessly to bring a product to market were shipping things while the rest of Microsoft slept. The story very clearly describes a dichotomy in Microsoft's culture between process/rules/superficial quality on the one hand and relentlessly shortening the ship/fix cycle on the other.
This post is not just about shortened ship/fix cycles, it is itself an example of a shortened write/fix cycle.
When that struck me, the style of post suddenly "clicked:" It was as if I was reading an email that was furiously blasted out to Posterous while the author's compiler worked, and thereafter there was no time for extensive editing and proofing by a circle of reviewers. What mattered was to get the idea out and to start the conversation, editing and polish would follow later.
Great stuff!
"Michael Burrows (born circa 1963) is widely known as the creator of the Burrows/Wheeler transform. He also was, with Louis Monier, one of the two main creators of AltaVista" (which I guess was the point!). He ironically now works to Google according to Wikipedia.
In university, we had to read one of his earlier papers, Eraser (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.22.3...).
Perhaps, the reason there were all these errors in the first place was because it was written in _that movement_ when one has a "quantum of thought"
On the other hand, careless writing shows that the author places little value on his thoughts, for if he thought them important he would spend a little more time on their delivery, ensuring the contents don't get destroyed in the process.
You infer from careless writing that the author places little value on his thoughts, because if you were writing them and you thought them important, you would spend a little more time on their delivery.
If you are writing only for yourself, then things like grammar and spelling are less important because, presumably, you know what you meant. However, if you want other people to value what you write, grammar and spelling become very important.
First, because poor grammar and spelling sabotage your meaning and delivery. There were several sentences in the article where I had to stop and think "err... what is he trying to say?" It is entirely likely I misinterpreted the meaning of some of these sentences. The fact that the author understood and valued those sentences is of utterly no help to me.
Second, there are people who believe confusing and ungrammatical writing are symptoms of confused and unknowledgeable writers. I understand you may not agree with this but, again, if you are writing for other people then it is the other person's impressions you must consider, not your own.
Defending ungrammatical writing by challenging a reader's inferences and thoughts is not convincing because, if you are writing for other readers, it is precisely those inferences and thoughts you should be addressing.
Furthermore, even though it's good form to read over a message you're sending and remove the typoes, grammar-os and other such issues, it doesn't always happen :)
Sorry about the typos/errors. I'm looking into this now :)
imo the post essentially says that the people he liked at Bing were all great. He then goes to suggest that the departure of all these great people (presumably including him) is equivalent to the death of Bing. He also chooses to indict unnamed "professional managers" while praising several other individuals (and managers) by name
Prasanna says that he is surprised to see his post at the "top of HN today". However, imo there is nothing surprising about a Microsoft-bashing post being on the front page:).
But...as an end user i don't think Bing was/is ever as as close to Google as the OP seems to think.
While Bing came closest to providing search results as accurate as Googles it still wasn't at any comparable level, so all in all I agree with your point.
it's really disgusting to see people quietly being blacklisted.
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1 point by kami8844 0 minutes ago | link [dead]
I had to do some web scraping for an application that I recently wrote and only when my app's performance started to rely on the results provided by the various search engines out there, I started to fully appreciate how good Google is. It's just no comparison; in edge cases and unconventional searches (where it really matters) Google completely creams the competition. While Bing came closest to providing search results as accurate as Googles it still wasn't at any comparable level, so all in all I agree with your point.
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If so, don't give too much weight to new reporters for flagging.
(I'm ambivalent about the stealth-blacklisting thing. It's probably the right thing to do with genuinely abusive users. It might be the right thing with people genuinely incapable of contributing much. But I've seen too many cases where someone's comments are all being auto-deaded -- invisibly to them, AIUI -- with no obvious reason why they should deserve it.)
Really? Sorry, but that sounds like a terrible idea. HN is already insular enough, we don't need to start demanding newcomers pass a test before we let them comment.
Comment: LOL
Is this an acceptable comment?
Right now people are used to that being an acceptable comment on the rest of the internet. These people currently get hellbanned on HN because other people downvote these comments. It's not a test for testing whether the people are acceptable on HN, it's method of teaching customs and a test for whether people have read the guidelines.
It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth and it's the last thing this community needs.
What do you think the likes of a Matt Cutts would do if they were trying to sign up for HN and the site forced them to say whether "LOL" was an appropriate comment before allowing them to post? It's insulting and arrogant and will drive away the kind of people we want posting here. All that for a "problem" that is invisible the vast majority of the time.
On the other hand the system is clearly broken now.
> The karma metric is pretty transparent. You learn very quickly which comments are and are not appreciated. Dropping a friendly comment to someone you see who hasn't caught on yet works, as well.
This is not the case as it is currently implemented. If one of your first comments gets downvoted you get hellbanned. There is no chance to learn from your mistakes. Dropping a friendly comment doesn't work either because you cannot respond to hellbanned people. Do you have showdead on? Try it and you'll probably see that about half of the hellbanned people still posting invisible comments are legitimate. For example you will find 3 of those people commenting on this post, two of them having no idea that nobody is reading their comments.
For example look at http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=bshock
This guy has been banned for 2 downvoted comments and has been posting legitimate but invisible comments for over a year. You can clearly see the learning effects: his first couple of comments are not HN quality. Unfortunately by the time he got accustomed to HN he had been silenced.
In isolation, I can't entirely disagree the downvotes, but it seems to me that the system ought to be more tolerant of people that screw up their first couple posts as long as they were honest contributions (as opposed to spam).
Perhaps the ban should be triggered a lot more heavily on flags than downvotes up to a certain number of posts.
A karma based ban that makes some sense for people that are consistently bad. But it seems to me that the current ban code doesn't give newcomers enough chance to change based on the feedback they've been given. New users don't have a buffer to fall back on if they make one or two bad posts, and ought to be given more leeway. As long as people are flagging correctly, that should take care of obvious trolls or spam.
I agree that the system is quite a bit too trigger-happy. Being shadowbanned is a pretty shitty spot to be in and I don't think 9 downvotes over 4 comments qualify for such harsh punishment.
Personally I'd say that depends. If you have a positive comment history then no you sholdn't be banned for a small run of comments that the community finds unhelpful to the conversation.
If all of your first comments are downvoted then I suggest you make a new account and wait until you have something positive to say.
Note that positive doesn't mean affirming groupthink, or karma whoring (which is hard here but looks possible) but adding to the conversation. An opposing opinion well expressed often won't win a lot of upvotes but it usually gets more ups than downs.
Note: the following unexpectedly turned into a bit of a rant, with a dose of whining thrown in:
Many of us "old-timers" think that downvoting without giving a reason is mostly bad form (the exception is for a rude or obnoxious comment). I've personally noticed an increase in this behavior.
I believe that doing so decreases the user experience. I've had plenty of disagreements over the years and have almost always learned something from them (even if it just required me to do a bit of soul-searching). Posts would be painstakingly composed (one of the big complaints we had was that the post-page timed out while we were composing- so we had to result in using a separate editor to compose, then click "reply" and copy-and-paste.
But now-- why bother? I've been around a while. I'm on my second (third?) career. Not a hacker extraordinaire by any means, but I'm well educated technically and have maintained my involvement with a broad array of interests (I like to learn new things). I've seen some things, and I'm willing to share- and even be challenged in my own conclusions about them.
But when I make a post that the "average HN-er" (age 25, so I hear) may not think is very smart and I immediately get downvoted with no reason given, it sends a signal that HN has changed in a very dramatic way.
The site is far less valuable than it used to be.
I know what you're talking about but it doesn't apply to comments. The only thing that automatically adds up and downvotes to comments is what they call 'fuzzy comment karma' which is to prevent bots from figuring out too quickly that they have been shadow-banned, since to them it looks like they are getting 2 downvotes here and 3 upvotes over there.
The system has been active longer than the post was old and it's just and example, if you read through comment threads back then and now, you will notice the difference without having to rely on karmic metrics.
Oh, yes, completely agree. It not the karma scoring that hurts, but rather than no discussion is considered acceptable.
it is best to simply accept downvotes without explanation as background noise
Sadly, yes.
WRT Reddit what I've heard on the site is that they have an obfuscation system that adds downvotes and hides the current voting position. It would be impossible thus to see that a story had 91 upvotes and no downs as apparent downvotes are automatically added. It's supposed to be part of the system to prevent people from gaming karma scores.
That's simply not true. There are plenty of examples of people getting downvoted for having a contrary viewpoint. Groupthink is alive and well on HN.
I feel like the results are essentially the same and I never recall having trouble finding what I'm looking for in Bing. Though I suppose one huge omission is the date filter. I use that a lot on Google and certainly miss it sometimes on Bing.
Most importantly, Google was essentially stagnant for years until Bing came along. Since then they've really upped their game. They cloned Bing image search. They took the context summary in Bing that I loved from the beginning and one-upped it. And I've seen more natural answers in Google to match what Bing set to do from day one.
I use and support Bing and you should too. What Bing did to Google is like what Firefox did to IE. It reminded them that they should be innovating still!
My level of frustration Redmond has reached epic levels. My company spends thousands of dollars a week managing advertising campaigns on Adcenter. They have an API which has been nothing but issues, but given the breadth of our advertising base it's absolutely necessary that we use it.
Today we have entered day number FIVE of an outage in which the API (at least one critical portion of it) simply errors out no matter what call you make. So for five days we've been unable to pause campaigns, change bid prices, or otherwise do anything to effectively manage our campaigns.
It's nuts. This is the second major outage in the last couple of weeks. The part that KILLS me is that nobody in Redmond seems to give a damn. They announced that they had a problem two days after I brought it to their attention. They are apparently working on some sort of fix that may or may not be pushed sometime in the last three days.
Meanwhile we are absolutely blowing through cash because of the things that we can't adjust. We're tens of thousands of keywords spread out over more than a thousand campaigns. We don't employ anybody to manage these by hand...
As far as I knew Live search was essentially failing then they made it Bing and it's started to succeed.
Am I missing something here or what?
I'm no expert on the history but it seems to me that the opposite of what the author is saying actually happened!
This is the take from one insider. I suspect if you were talk to someone else on the Bing team you may get a very different story.
I thought that Bing was the true turning point as well, but I never gave Live Search a fair chance then, and I don't think many others did either.
To me, it looks like the author saw Bing/Live Search as something truly transformational within Microsoft. Public perception was that Live was a failure. But if I understand currently, the team was easily beating internal estimates extremely fast . For one reason or another there was a team reorganization that coincided with the PowerSet acquisition and the Bing rebrand. While there was a jump in market share, the foundation of the Bing team was taken out from under them and replaced with MS status quo.
Bing's death isn't a result of their success or failure as a search engine. Bing's death refers to the loss of something that could have made a difference in Microsoft, internally. The death of a team that could have done something truly great , (EDIT: as said by Cicero, when they were at their peak).
At that time I was paying a lot of attention to search results, from two perspectives: 1) I had some slightly unusual / difficult searches I performed regularly, and 2) examining search terms that brought people to some sites I ran.
For case 1, Google simply wiped the floor with Live. Note that Live had the most relevant results in their index, but they'd be way down on the 5th page, 10th page, wherever.
For case 2, the majority of people coming to my sites from Live were coming there with search terms indicating that they did not want my site. For example, I had content for Phoenix, AZ and some polls. My site stayed within the top 5 on Live for search terms like "phoenix polling locations." Of course every site gets some of this from any search engine, but with Live is was problematic.
My perception was that Live was a failure, and I think my reasons were valid.
I didn't intend to say people's perspectives weren't, rather that from an insider's perspective, Live was very much approaching success.
Hmm. I'm gonna have to disagree with that part. :)
I still know for a fact that, it takes at-least a month on average, for a search change list to reach production. Would you disagree Matt?
Being secretive about release cycles is pointless stealth.
I was having a look at Terabyte drives in Best Buy yesterday, and while wondering how well a model might work with Linux, I realized, now the display computers actually have internet capability, I should be able to look it up right there in the store! So, I wander over to a convenient laptop, kick it out of screensaver mode, start up the browser, and plug in the product name. Only after I hit the search button did I notice WHAT service I was using. Added bonus: Google was NOT an option.
I'll believe that Bing is dead when it isn't the default search engine in the default browser on the default operating system at the default computer store.
From an abstract business perspective it's worked remarkably well. But if so many motivated and talented people are leaving, then there's something fundamentally flawed. And there were a lot of other much-less-expensive approaches they could have taken instead (or in addition, if they wanted to shoot for the moon) that would have also created a lot more opportunities for growth and excitement for younger engineers in particular. Ah well.
So, how are most managers evaluated? By the amount of "managing" they do, as measured by the amount of process they impose on their team. Evaluating a manager by the amount of managing they do is exactly the same thing as evaluating a programmer by the amount of code they write. And it produces results like you describe, where the manager works to produce evidence of their management in the form of processes and decisions from the top down, rather than facilitating the work actually being done.
In a simplistic world, the answer would be to change the incentives and the behaviour would change itself. But as they say, "correlation does not equal causation." The incentives have to change, but so do the people. Results-oriented managers don't work in those kind of environments to begin with, and after a year or two in such a place they will already have left. You need to change the incentives and the culture and the people all together.
So they agitate for (wait for it) maximum budget and minimum feature set. So that success is assured and their metric is optimized.
Unfortunately those things are exactly contrary to company goals. Why does this happen?
{opinion} Middle managers are too remote from either customers (financial goals) or top management (company goals). They're in the middle, right? With layers between them and either end.
And when you try to optimize any process with too many degrees of freedom, you have too many variables and get to choose which ones to look at. So middle managers look at their own career and ignore the rest.
My suggestion: line up all middle managers in the parking lot (important), stand at the end of the line, and put one bullet through all of them (optimizes cost in bullets).
If my company Ever has middle managers, its time to call it quits.
So eventually it's the fault of the upper management, if they can't come up with the right incentive scheme to keep things moving smoothly.
I hate middle-managers too with a passion; but having seen them operate, I can't blame them for doing what they do. They're just playing the game by the rules. Blame the one who made up the rules.
A guy who would on the surface do very little yet gets excellent results, should be appreciated more than somebody who appears to do a lot of work yet has no end results to brag about.
I totally agree with you in that it is the people that is the most important of all things. Tools are just tools and processes are just processes, it is the people when given right tools and shown right processes that make all the difference.
This is what really stood out to me. I'm in tech management these days...I pay my good developers close to $90K, and I'm no Google or Microsoft. What's wrong with this picture? Bing was created what...four years ago? Is this really a realistic salary for the best hackers?
Note: I am not affiliated with this site in any way.
See here
http://blindsearch.fejus.com/?q=21+de+setiembre+y+sarmiento&...
it would have me believe that Bing's were the better results (they weren't for this particular search).
Also, when I'm logged in and using my country-specific search, Google is way, way, way better than the competition.
Edit: I'll probably message the creator (parent is not affiliated with the site)
Microsoft has always been good at the pivotal turnaround. Recognizing when a key moment was on the wind, mustering together a tremendous effort, making a good number of smart decisions and putting out a solid anchor product that (re)cements their position in the industry and reinvigorates the brand in doing so. Windows 95 and Windows 7 are perfect examples. IE4 (yes really), Bing, and Windows Phone 7 are also good examples. One of the big problems with Microsoft is that its organization and its culture are extremely tied to the traditional 3-ish year ship cycle. A hugely successful diving catch every other ship cycle or so is rapidly becoming less and less feasible as a means to hang on to or acquire a market. Microsoft does not seem to get the web at a fundamental level, it doesn't seem to have the capacity to release software at a pace of yearly, monthly, or continuously.
And that will ultimately be the undoing of Bing and the Windows Phone. The only way MS knows how to crank out releases faster is the deathmarch, and that is a certain route to doom.
Worse yet, since Gates left MS has no real technical or managerial leadership, it's bureaucracy all the way up and down. This has been affecting the culture at Microsoft little by little, also partly coupled to the stock price having plateaued. More and more talented devs are finding that MS lacks the excitement and the reward of cutting edge development, so they are moving elsewhere. Also, without that talent around fewer good projects are pushed forward, fewer projects succeed, people become less satisfied with their jobs, etc. (think about the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" only translate the bad stuff, on a corporate level, to hundreds and then thousands of George Bailey's going away). This makes the environment that much less rewarding for everyone else who remains, so yet more people leave. And slowly but surely the creep of a more rigid and bureaucratic corporate culture and organization fills in the gaps left by the people who had the most clout in the company, causing yet more and more talent to evaporate away.
It's a self-reinforcing cycle that will lead to the rapid diminution of the company and its prospects over time and the examples the article provides of the process as it happened at Bing have played out throughout the company. Nobody young with high prospects seriously considers Microsoft as a destination anymore, and increasingly the older devs are either retiring on their massive earnings from the glory days or they're just looking for somewhere else to be that's a better use of their time and talent.
MS continues to make a crap-ton of money from its core products, but it will be institutionally ham-strung in responding to the threats that will steal away that revenue (such as mobile-heritage operating systems). Because those threats will grow at a rate MS is incapable of competing with.
> I don't know that Bing has "failed" yet
Microsoft doesn't either. I have no doubt Google's search will be superseded by an even more competent product. I just doubt Microsoft is able to deliver such thing. To go against Google you either need infinitely deep pockets or a technology so disruptive that it effectively neutralizes the size advantage Google has or turns into a disadvantage. Microsoft will go head-on with Google until it acknowledges failure, rename the product and try again. Much like the Black Knight on Monty Python's Holy Grail, they just won't quit. And, when they do, they'll claim victory.
> Microsoft has always been good at the pivotal turnaround. Recognizing when a key moment was on the wind, mustering together a tremendous effort
I remember it happening once - they went against Netscape. They could outspend Netscape 100 to one and bundle/force bundle their competitor with their OS and that's why they could crush Netscape. They can't outspend Google two to one.
Note: I remember how they took the air out of Netware with Windows for Workgroups. They recognized there was a market below the one Novell had nearly monopolized and took it before Novell could launch a competitor (something hard because it came - again - bundled with the client) and provided a smooth upgrade path to Windows NT. But that's not the same as with IE vs. NS - they had Lan Manager for eons before they realized they had a niche they could expand. And, like with IE, they could rely on bundling with their OS. I doubt Microsoft can put Google in that position.
I don't think it will be a matter of technical competence, but of economic competence. The achilles heal of Google's model is it's dependence on advertising and the incentive such dependence creates to skew search results and engage in "creepy" behavior with respect to individual privacy. The way in which Google monetizes search is increasingly susceptible to significant social and legal backlash. the structure of Microsoft's revenue stream is such that Bing could be adapted to the radical changes such a backlash would entail more easily than Google's data mining based revenue stream would allow Google Search to be adapted.
It is a nice place for a niche player (like DDG) to come in and fill tho.
For Microsoft, having a full featured reliable non-core product with measurable market share is a success because it allows Microsoft to offer vertical integration without the specter of anti-trust allegations - imagine the howling in DC and Europe if Bing controlled 70% of search (never mind the valley).
Bing's robustness helps Microsoft sell software and services, while it's modest market share keeps infrastructure costs lower and Microsoft's core revenue stream coming from areas other than search reduces the pressure to game search algorithms towards their advertisers in order to increase revenue in the way that Google does.
What the article shows is not that Microsoft is inept, but rather that they are able to create an internal unit with many elements of a startup, scale that unit massively, and then transition it into a solid corporate structure capable of surviving over the long term - in other words, the article shows that Microsoft was not only able to successfully foster internal entrepreneurship in order to quickly move into a new market and capture meaningful market share in the face of a mammoth, entrenched, and powerful rival which dominated the market, but also to consolidate that position swiftly before their rival could respond in a significant way.
This is a the reason that Microsoft is a fast copier of market leaders, so that everything consumers could want, on paper, is housed within their roof (and Google's). It seems counterintuitive that less differentiation would be useful, but I think it's what Microsoft is going for.
One look at my website statistics tells me Bing is already as good as dead.
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/20...
http://www.stateofsearch.com/bing-gaining-share-in-the-us-su...
[1] http://blog.compete.com/2011/03/16/february-2011-search-mark...
So long a Bing provides meaningful statistical data regarding internet search,keeps Google from data mining searches performed in Redmond, and serves as a productive R&D platform it is successful for Microsoft because they do not need to generate significant revenue from advertising to be profitable.
While I don't doubt that powerpoints about quick easy money from advertising were legion in Redmond, it doesn't change my belief that Bing has been a significant success for Microsoft despite the money being neither quick nor easy. The notion of measuring the success of the Bing team against the whole of Google is silly. Bing's success should be measured solely by the business benefits it provides to Microsoft.
I find this statement confusing. Perhaps in terms of absolute numbers, infrastructure costs are less at smaller scale, but as a percentage of revenue, larger scale usually shows increased infrastructure leverage, until you get to Microsoft/Google/Facebook size, and start designing your own Servers, Power Supplies, Storage, etc...
It's completely reasonable to compare companies against each other to determine their success - particularly when being the leader gives you network-effect benefits.
It is also important to acknowledge the opportunity costs for Microsoft that scaling Bing might entail, e.g. is infrastructure more profitably used for cloud services or search? Does an advertising revenue model interfere with the necessary trust which underpins Microsoft's business relationships with enterprise customers?
I am not saying it is unreasonable to compare Microsoft with Google at the corporate level - but using Bing and Google Search as the primary criterion for such a comparison is a category mistake.
That implies that there will no longer be any relevant technical progress, any more.
That is at least anecdotal evidence that things are progressing in some way or another.
Why would you want a predictably wrong answer, you must be a manager.
How do you know it doesn't go back to showing irrelevant results on the 28th?
Birth and Death of Jellyfish.com
Does having a huge market cap automatically make a company evil?
I imagine there are a large number of small and/or untraded businesses with dishonest or illegal practices. Perhaps data would even show that larger market cap indicates corruption is less likely, depending on your measurement for corruption?
Completely un-Microsoft, I can't see it happening but if it did.. Damn that could make things interesting.
Bing is interesting, it's a great attempt. The problem is Microsoft, so long as they're running it and setting the "standard" for it, it's going to be a failure. It's not going to knock Google off their perch. It's just not. And anything less than that will be a failure. Cut that team and product free, hand it over to like a facebook? IBM went through some similar stuff, MS should be spinning stuff out, if their current phone effort fails again to live up to their hype, they should just cut that group free too, let them go and be successful. that stuff creates new industries which in turn create new opportunities for everybody, including MS. Let Bing or Bing + FB cultivate an army of guys that want to get rich and can control their own destiny, the output will be far more interesting
A lot of times when things seem to be dead, they are on the edge of killing everything else.
The definition of a startup is company with a limited operating history and a company is an organization aimed at making profits.
Is this a joke?