Don Dodge

Bing's travel search is the best in the Biz as far as I'm concerned.

Wolfram Alpha is phenomenal for certain types of queries. I find their results for companies pages to be so cleaner and more intuitive than either Google or Bing's.

I think there are huge openings for competing with Google and Bing when focused on a specific niche. Google's revenue per search query in the US is $0.12.[1] And, I know I"m getting frustrated with their search results, and I find myself using multiple search engines for different types of queries.

There's tons of room for competition in this market, and I don't know why more startups aren't taking advantage of it.

<shameless plug>

This is the reason that we're turning http://Newsley.com into a search engine for economic and financial news. The news sections of Yahoo Finance and Google Finance suck IMHO. We're trying to make financial news search suck less.

We're focusing on building our index and results pages like crazy right now. We're currently indexing the Economist, NYT Business and BBC Business[2]. Bloomberg News should be online this week.

After getting Bloomberg online, we're going to focus on getting the alpha version of our search released.

We're making our results pages available as soon as possible, however, so we can start building a bit of organic search traffic to our site even before search is released. So far, it's worked great. Since we started releasing those pages 6 weeks ago, our traffic has tripled.

In…

Looks like Don has a history of picking winners working for DEC, Forte, Compaq, AltaVista, Napster, Groove, deNovis and now Microsoft. [0]

I love microsofties, they go straight for the throat. The circumspect ex-softies trash MS these days for MS's lack of focus & ability to adapt. This is because MS has lost their core asset, their API.

'... The cornerstone of Microsoft's monopoly power and incredibly profitable Windows and Office franchises, which account for virtually all of Microsoft's income and covers up a huge array of unprofitable or marginally profitable product lines, the Windows API is no longer of much interest to developers ...' [1]

There is still some great stuff coming out of MS, but they hardly excite the next generation of developers of software. Some of these issues revolve around the dollar costs associated with owning MS operating systems & associated software. Cheaper and more open alternatives don't help. [2]

To hear Office, Corporate ownership and X-Box [3] demonstrates to me the developers have left, and marketroids are bleating the 'marketing & business' advantages, where in the past it would have been technical advantages. [4]

'... Defaults. Microsoft will design Windows so as to enable computer manufacturers and users to set non-Microsoft programs to operate by default in key categories, such as Web browsing and media playback, in lieu of corresponding end-user functionality in Windows ...' [5]

And as for Microsoft being benevolent,…

Clicking through to the cited posts:

1. http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2006/12/options_on_goog.html - Most of this post is praising Google for their TSO program. Microsoft is mentioned almost as an afterthought, to show that they also have good employee benefits (not exactly a secret).

2. http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2005/11/google_data_cen.html - This was written in 2005, and is pretty much exactly in line with the predominant sentiment of that time. It's hard to make the case even today that Google has yet really attacked MS directly (no desktop OS, a much lighter office suite, etc).

3. http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2006/10/office_20_free_.html - Again, mostly in praise of Google, talking specifically about how online office suites are a potentially disruptive technology that MS is scrambling to get a slice of like everyone else. And, feature-for-feature, um, of course MS Office wins. But if you don't care about feature count, so what?

4. http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/12/google-vs-micro.html - He specifically says Google is to today's MS as Toyota was to Ford or MS was to IBM 30 years ago. The whimper about MS having smart folks who have played disruptor themselves doesn't exactly equate to "Google won't disrupt MS".

5. http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/02/google_apps_tak.html - Alright, Fake Steve has this one pretty spot on.

6. …

what's the point of working so hard if nobody gets to enjoy it but me?

Life starts posing those existential questions at the extremes of sacrifice, especially when you're working for something your brain subconsciously knows could potentially turn out to be vaporware.

If you're going to play the game of wanting users, then 1) immediate and regular program-shaping user feedback is king and 2) many overnight successes take longer than expected [1]. At 4 years in you're really just getting started with learning. Obviously you're in the phase now where you recognize you need help and can't do it all yourself, so how badly do you want your Everest? It always takes teams to reach any great summit.

[1] https://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2008/05/guitar-hero-a-1.html

I assume it means that some features are "good for you," while others are opiates; and possibly that this is a bad thing because opiates mask pain, and graphing pain is a crucial part of iterating a design, so the more opiates a design has, the more confounding factors there will be to evolving a good core product. (That's not to say that I agree that on-site search is an opiate, but an argument could be made for it.)

EDIT: Oh, wait, I screwed that up completely. It's from here: http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2008/03/does-your-start.html

Apparently, painkillers are the good things. Goes to show how weak analogies won't actually carry your message.

You should read Microsoft's reply to the essay [0] which contains your arguments and PG's reply to it [1].

It's interesting to review claims from years ago and I think PG was largely right. Microsoft is not completely irrelevant (yet?) but they definitely lost the cultural war and moves like open sourcing .NET show that they want to join the old opponent's positions.

I'll add that I'm not sure if Microsoft's historical influence was evil. They prevented fragmentation and created a unified environment and probably enabled PC revolution.

[0] http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/04/since_when_does.html
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/cliffsnotes.html