There is a certain kind of people that at times makes me laugh and at times pisses me off. A friend of mine, who has been working as a web developer for years, is the typical example.

Today during lunch time we had more or less the following conversation:

friend: “Have you seen the new Bing thing?”
me: “yes”
friend: “what do you think about it, I heard it is just like the thing they had before”
me: “it works pretty well, I think it is a valid alternative to Google for many searches”
friend: “but Google’s monopoly is different from the Microsoft one, they are good [litteraly].”
me: speechless then “well I was hoping it to be more on the lines of Wolfram Alpha”
friend: goes online, tries Wolfram Alpha, and then says “it won’t last people will go back to Google”

I am really starting to wonder if he is on a secret list of Google’s employees… Or is he CoronaCoder?

I have many friends like that.

Me: Look, Bing delivers really great results with many additional features

Friend: But Google has still more relevant results.

Me: (Quick demo on results) So you agree that the results are not worse.

Friend: Yes, but Google is still better. (for unspecified reasons)

Yeah I hate it when people have different opinions then me too.

Bass said:

Yeah I hate it when people have different opinions then me too.

Those type of people shouldn't be on the internet.

longzheng said:

Bass said:

*snip*

Those type of people shouldn't be on the internet.

Agreed! The Internet belongs to MEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

Bass said:

longzheng said:

*snip*

Agreed! The Internet belongs to MEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

Yeah it's like this:

Me: Vista has some neat stuff in it.

Person: Yeah, too bad it crashes all the time.

Me: Huh? I've been using it for two years with zero problems. Yours crashes a lot?

Person: No, I don't run Vista. I heard it sucks.

Me: [rolls eyes]

Peter Drucker said that new technology needs to be 10 times better than existing technology in order to catch on. This is the reason why M$ releasing an iPod clone won't convince existing iPod users to switch just because they will get the same kind of service that they have already. What bing is internationally is a re-branded MSN/Live Search/call it what you want thing and in the US it's Live Search with more sponsored results appearing in more prominent places on the page which is supposedly what makes the search results more relevant. Therefore not only M$ isn't nowhere near the kind of service its competitors have (which still wouldn't be sufficient to dominate the market) but it has got a worse product and its fanboys complain about the market share.

spivonious said:

Bass said:

*snip*

Yeah it's like this:

Me: Vista has some neat stuff in it.

Person: Yeah, too bad it crashes all the time.

Me: Huh? I've been using it for two years with zero problems. Yours crashes a lot?

Person: No, I don't run Vista. I heard it sucks.

Me: [rolls eyes]

Tech savvy people have complained about Windows for years yet nobody seemed to notice and with Vista it was the first time the ordinary user felt screwed by getting an expensive OS which couldn't even provide the functionality they primarily used their WinXP for that is running their software and supporting their hardware let alone offer anything more to WinXP which is of any value (not just eye candy that takes real estate from you screen).

I am really starting to wonder if he is on a secret list of Google’s employees… Or is he CoronaCoder?

Some people on this forum have a Microsoft or PDC2008 logo below their posts therefore they are not on a secret list of M$ employees but on the official list of M$ employees which is the reason why some of them are so dishonest in their responses to the people who are not impressed by some new piece of garbage.

spivonious said:

Bass said:

*snip*

Yeah it's like this:

Me: Vista has some neat stuff in it.

Person: Yeah, too bad it crashes all the time.

Me: Huh? I've been using it for two years with zero problems. Yours crashes a lot?

Person: No, I don't run Vista. I heard it sucks.

Me: [rolls eyes]

That's kind of why I've stopped using reason and just move directly to physical violence.

Ubuntu said:

Peter Drucker said that new technology needs to be 10 times better than existing technology in order to catch on. This is the reason why M$ releasing an iPod clone won't convince existing iPod users to switch just because they will get the same kind of service that they have already. What bing is internationally is a re-branded MSN/Live Search/call it what you want thing and in the US it's Live Search with more sponsored results appearing in more prominent places on the page which is supposedly what makes the search results more relevant. Therefore not only M$ isn't nowhere near the kind of service its competitors have (which still wouldn't be sufficient to dominate the market) but it has got a worse product and its fanboys complain about the market share.

Its all really circular. If reviewers just said it was good instead of saying 'its good but its not 10x as good' people might start getting interested. The main reason something needs to be 10x as good to catch on is because of fashion, and reviewers help shape fashion. That type of logic gives an excuse to write a negative review and its really very annoying.

Average people have been repeating what tech savvy people have been saying for years about Windows also. When Windows 95 came out everyone was talking about horrible installation experiences, that they probably never had themselves. But now everyone has blogs so they can be louder. And they also can read thousands of other blogs, so they can sound like they know a lot.

brian.shapiro said:

Ubuntu said:

*snip*

Its all really circular. If reviewers just said it was good instead of saying 'its good but its not 10x as good' people might start getting interested. The main reason something needs to be 10x as good to catch on is because of fashion, and reviewers help shape fashion. That type of logic gives an excuse to write a negative review and its really very annoying.

Average people have been repeating what tech savvy people have been saying for years about Windows also. When Windows 95 came out everyone was talking about horrible installation experiences, that they probably never had themselves. But now everyone has blogs so they can be louder. And they also can read thousands of other blogs, so they can sound like they know a lot.

 

It's enough to check the reviews of Vista on Amazon to hear lots of authentic stories of people who were disappointed because they couldn't get it to work – they give very specific problems they faced and these are not bloggers or some M$ hostile crowd – these were just regular people having purchased the thing and describing their experience with it.

Ubuntu said:

brian.shapiro said:

*snip*

It's enough to check the reviews of Vista on Amazon to hear lots of authentic stories of people who were disappointed because they couldn't get it to work – they give very specific problems they faced and these are not bloggers or some M$ hostile crowd – these were just regular people having purchased the thing and describing their experience with it.

Bah! Why does every thread have to turn into a Vista bashfest? You don't like it, everyone knows that, but unless it's on topic, nobody really cares (unless they're interested in a flame war)!

As for Bing, well, I liked the name "Kumo" better for some reason, but I guess "Bing" has a way more better potential to catch on in daily person to person talk. Search results are so far relevant, and have some neat and useful previews next to them. My persional opinion is that the current bar on the left side belongs on the right side, because most of the world reads text from left to right, and when there's something in the way that's 95% irrelevant, then it becomes a nag. Ditch the uneccessary toolbars. Search sessions for one particular term last only a few seconds for most people and there's no room for even one tiny dot on the screen that shouldn't be there. I applaud Video Search - it's just works and feels great.

Image search, however, should include at least the image size below thumbnails, so we can distinguish low quality images from higher ones more quickly. Currency conversions would be a nice addition as well.

It's also cool that MS decided to keep the spirit of the previous Live Search home page with new images and neat facts to boost every day. Me likey. I have to say, the line between Google and Bing is getting increasingly thinner, up to the point where only my search habit is in the way of making the switch.

Ubuntu said:

brian.shapiro said:

*snip*

It's enough to check the reviews of Vista on Amazon to hear lots of authentic stories of people who were disappointed because they couldn't get it to work – they give very specific problems they faced and these are not bloggers or some M$ hostile crowd – these were just regular people having purchased the thing and describing their experience with it.

Vista works for me. I have never writen any review of Vista on Amazon or anywhere else. Put two and two together.

Ubuntu said:

brian.shapiro said:

*snip*

It's enough to check the reviews of Vista on Amazon to hear lots of authentic stories of people who were disappointed because they couldn't get it to work – they give very specific problems they faced and these are not bloggers or some M$ hostile crowd – these were just regular people having purchased the thing and describing their experience with it.

I never said there weren't people that experienced problems, there were people who faced problems with earlier releases of Windows also. And to be sure, there were problems with Vista's release.

Other OSs also have problems, often different types of problems. Because Windows is made for a large amount of hardware people often face driver compatibility issues. People who have been using Macintoshes for years are used to all of their old software being obsolete on every major release.

I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu or any other Linux distro to someone who's frustrated with driver compatibility problems.

People will be people..

intelman said:

People will be people..

Google is a good search engine, but the reason they're number one has nothing to do with those types of examples People don't routinely search for electron configurations or to do calculations like that. I'd guess only a very tiny percentage of Google users care about those things.

brian.shapiro said:

intelman said:

*snip*

Google is a good search engine, but the reason they're number one has nothing to do with those types of examples People don't routinely search for electron configurations or to do calculations like that. I'd guess only a very tiny percentage of Google users care about those things.

 

 

I moved my examples to the bing thread, I figured it was more appropriate. It does not matter if I am a small percentage of people do those searches. I would say a high percentage of engineers and science types do. Students and scientists uses computers quite a bit...

Google thought it was important to include those things, and they did....

I would be surprised if students across america didn't use these tools. Google must have figured that out.

I am sure many people care about finding a restaurant in their town to order takeout from. I think that is a pretty relevant "normal person" search.