Posts Tagged: microsoft

Noticed / Research — No Comments
22
Sep 08

Microsoft launches MSR New England

Microsoft Research has launched a new, interdisciplinary research center – MSR New England – in Cambridge, MA.  I’ve found out about this from danah boyd, who is joining the center.  danah writes:

Jennifer and Christian’s vision for the lab aligned with my view of research. They believe in interdisciplinary work, believe in the ways that new ideas can come from unexpected collaborations. While I know a lot of social scientists who curl their nose at the idea of a lab full of physicists, mathematicians, and economists, I find that quite appealing.

Microsoft describes the lab as “pursuing new, interdisciplinary areas of research that bring together core computer scientists and social scientists to understand, model, and enable the computing and online experiences of the future.”  This is great news for danah, a huge win for Microsoft, and another really exciting research center on the East Coast.  I’ll be keeping my eye on Microsoft and IBM.

Noticed / Thoughts — 2 Comments
26
Oct 07

Perspectives on the Microsoft-Facebook Partnership

It’s been two days since MicroBook (or Face-o-Soft, if you will), and the dust is finally starting to settle after the announcement. As someone who has watched the company for the past few years, I want to congratulate them – this is a big deal and a major validation. I’ve been collecting a few critical perspectives on the deal – which I’ll share here in a linkdump.

First, regarding the valuation, Nick Carr reports that “[Microsoft's] investment, in isolation, tells us very little about the true worth of Facebook.” Josh Quittner, of Fortune, states that the valuation “that depends on whether you believe Facebook is just the latest online fad—or whether, as Facebookies believe, the social network is building the next, grand computing platform.” The Blogging Stocks asks “Why is $1 of Facebook revenue worth 7.1 times Google’s and 17.5 times Microsoft’s?” Andy Beal sheds some light on “Why Microsoft needed Facebook & Google didn’t.” Finally, Techdirt states:

However, there are still plenty of questions about how much money the site can really generate long term. When Yahoo apparently tried to buy Facebook last year for $1.62 billion, the math still seemed ridiculous and hard to support. To then make the case for a valuation 10x only a year later goes into fantasy territory.

With regards to privacy and identity issues, I found two interesting posts via Doc Searls. The first is a thoughtful piece from Jeremiah Owyang entitled “How Microsoft got their Passport afterall.” Doc’s piece at LinuxJournal also raises some important questions:

Here’s the key fact: Facebook’s users are not its customers. They’re the targets to which Facebook’s customers aim advertising. In old media this was no big deal. But Facebook isn’t just a “medium”. It’s a vast walled garden where the social activity of members and visitors constantly improves the ability of advertisers to “target” both.

For a more pessimistic view, Paul Jacobson reports on a small contingent leaving Facebook after the Microsoft deal. But to where? For Jacobson, and many high-connectivity individuals, new contexts like Twitter, Jaiku or Tumblr. For many without situationally relevant social needs, these networks offer a interesting respite from ego-centric social networks.

My take on the partnership? It’s been the same since I first wrote about it in 2006. Facebook is this generation’s identity archive, and any company with sophisticated data-mining tools can derive significant value from the data. Google’s entire infrastructure is set up around this type of data collection; Facebook just bought it for the steal of 240MM. Here’s what I wrote last year (just s/Microsoft/Google/g):

I’ve gone down this tangent to explain the value of the data Facebook owns. Put simply, Facebook owns the data, use patterns, preferences, communications and adoption trends of the entire next web generation. Whatsmore, the data is incredibly clean, trustworthy, and segmented as a marketer could only dream. But don’t get completely trapped by the marketing aspects, there’s something much greater in Facebook’s data. Facebook owns the data of the first generation to live their entire lives online, a generation that we will spend our lives studying and trying to understand. These young people are out of our frame of reference, and they will completely drive the next 30 years of the social web. Does anyone doubt me on that?

It takes broad thinking, broad ability to operationalize, and a very long view to take on such a project, meaning there are only a few companies that could do it. Boiling it down more, there’s really only one company that I can think of that would actually take a project like this on. It is Google. Google, for all its faults, wishes to deeply understand its users, and it wishes to be part all aspects of our web interaction in the future. An investment of 2BN into a corpus of data like the Facebook’s would be a key strategic acquisition, one that frankly makes sense for a company creatively thinking about the next 30 years.

Noticed / Thoughts — 1 Comment
20
Apr 06

The Coming Academic Search War

In the midst of writing two literature reviews (and procrastinating by blogging), I’ve been putting Windows Live Academic and Google Scholar head-to-head. I’ve tempered my exuberance a little as I seem to demonstrate a clear preference to the speed and simple UI of Google; plus, Jeff’s criticism’s are resounding. However, it is clear that Microsoft has caught Google’s attention, with the Google Scholar team today adding a temporal relevance ranking:

It’s not just a plain sort by date, but rather we try to rank recent papers the way researchers do, by looking at the prominence of the author’s and journal’s previous papers, how many citations it already has, when it was written, and so on.

Sort of nebulous, and I imagine open-access publishers will lose out. I find myself inspired by this growing commercial academic search arms race, so I’m going to pick it up for coverage. I think the differences in the Microsoft and Google products are very telling, for a few reasons.

  1. The core assumptions in the user interface are dramatically different.
  2. The difference in time investment each company has made into their products are noticeable.
  3. Each company seems to have vastly different expectations of the market.

Microsoft clearly acknowledges it is playing catch-up in the search market. In creating an academic search product that has a rich interface, and closely integrating it with its core search offerings, you begin to see Microsoft’s strategy emerging: The young people that comprise the academic search market may be stripped away from Google because the assumptions Google works on may not be universal. This is to say: Microsoft is investing in academic search to undercut Google, and I think it’s a very cunning move.

Its hard to not like the Google experience, regardless of hang-ups about Google’s policies and practices. Their search is fast, clean, and often times spot-on. If it ain’t broke, as the saying goes, don’t fix it. However, the nature of the web is changing, and the web’s younger users represent a new bloc of searchers that may vote on different principles. While you and I praise simplicity and efficiency, the MySpace generation may actually want different things, as hard as that is to believe. Microsoft has seen an opportunity to engage the young people with a different type of academic search, and this may ultimately lead to conversions in search preference.

Of course, I’m just reading tea leaves here. The more I study the online behavior of the 17-22 year old bloc, though, the more I’m inspired to climb to the top of a mountain and shout: “Wake up people, these are our future collaborators and customers, and they’re operating on a whole different set of assumptions then we are.” The born-digital “myth” isn’t a myth, and when I see a company make a strategic move towards the born digital’s in such an important market, its really pretty exciting. We’ll crow about how Live Academic isn’t like Google, but I‘d give Live Academic more credit if they just didn’t listen to us. Listen to the youth, because they’re the future.

Update 1: That would be an incredibly awkward and dorky thing to scream from the top of a mountain. If I were on top of a mountain I would probably say something much more terse, or maybe just sit quietly and eat a peanut butter sandwich.

Update 2: Born digital in this context refers to those who have “lived online” their entire life. I’m studying archiving now so I should really be more cautious with a term like born digital.