According to a report in the Business Insider, the search scene is showing some unexpected changes.
- Yahoo! up for six consecutive months. The former leader is now carrying about 21% of all US searches.
- Google down half a point to 63% of US searches in December.
- MSN up two-tenths of a point to 8.5% of US searches in December.
No word on whether MSN's numbers include Microsoft-owned Live.com.
Over the past year, a number of people had written Yahoo! off, claiming that the company had no future apart from Microsoft. And yet, those who watch Microsoft are calling for the company to dump its failing search businesses and open source Windows. After pouring billions of dollars into search, tying its market-leading Internet Explorer browser to MSN/Live search, and even paying users to search on their sites, the company is still not even garnering 10% of domestic searches. Yahoo! is getting double that quantity, without the subsidies, the legally-questionable product-tying, or the bribes.
One would have to be a complete moron to believe that merging Microsoft's MSN/Live unit with any part of Yahoo! will result in anything other than complete dominance (possibly over 90% share) for Google. The same incompetents who couldn't make it with the backing of one of the richest companies in the world are supposed to suddenly marry a completely different culture, a completely different set of technologies, and a completely different set of search techniques into their failed company without chasing away the bright minds at Yahoo! that make it what it is? Utter foolishness, I say.
Hat tip: Jim Robertson.
I can now report that Hotmail works with Firefox and Epiphany, but not SeaMonkey, Galeon, Konqueror or Opera. I haven't tested K-Meleon, Safari, Chrome, or Camino.
As an aside, I think there is something in ASP.Net that causes non-standard markup to be emitted. Both CareerBuilder and Monster have problems with users of the standards-compliant Opera browser. Is it intentional, or is it another coding error?
With Internet Explorer continuing to lose market share (currently at 68%), the use of IE-specific extensions can only cause ASP-powered sites (such as the MSN/Live family of sites) to also lose share to their more standards-friendly and multi-browser friendly competitors. This can only be good for the Web, since it reduces the ability of any particular entity to control users' access or experience.
We salute the end of single-browser dominance and continue to announce and proclaim the free and open Web. Openness wins, in the end. We all know it, even in the halls of Redmond and Cupertino. Openness (free / libre and open source software) will be the dominant software development model. Openness (open standards) will be the dominant way to choose file formats and network protocols--and the software that uses them. Openness (user-friendly data-collection, data-retention, data-dissemination, and data-destruction policies) will be the dominant way that government agencies and Web sites operate, as well.
We consider several implications of these results including the lack of perfect compatibility between implementations, the lack of good implementations outside of Windows, and the surprisingly good overall performance of OOXML implementations. The interoperability issues are troubling and suggest the need for improved interoperability testing for document formats. The results also highlight the importance of interoperability for open standards in general. Without interoperability, governments will be locked-in to the dominant implementations for either standard and in the process lose many of the benefits that might accrue from adopting an open standard in the first instance.
I would note that there aren't really many implementations of OOXML yet. Microsoft Office 2007, plus its conversion pack for Office 2003 and earlier are one implementation. WordPerfect would be a separate implementation. AbiWord would be still another implementation, and finally the implementation that Novell brought to OpenOffice.org, which is based on the ODF-OOXML conversion plugin project. While there isn't a list in this study abstract, it would three of the five mentioned are either Microsoft code or performed with Microsoft funding and technical assistance. I would like to see how well AbiWord, WordPerfect, and ThinkFree comply with the standard and how well they interoperate with other implementations including Microsoft's.
On the other hand, ODF implementers are fully aware that they have a long way to go. I personally utilize KOffice and OpenOffice, frequently noticing that they do things differently. I used to use AbiWord, but version 2.4.6 (the one I have) crashes so often that I cannot do any work with it.
The study (or at least the abstract that is available) does emphasize the need to have multiple, interoperable implementations--working code--for any open standard before we can expect many of the benefits of such a standard.
This paper suggests that governments seeking the benefits of open standards need to consider the role of interoperability. Without multiple interoperable implementations, i.e., "running code", users will not gain the advantages of competition and substitutability. To highlight the issues around interoperability, we examined the interoperability issues around ODF and OOXML.
Anyway, it is great to see that the academic world too is starting to take interest in openness--open standards, open source, open access. This is a growing trend that will eventually sweep away corporate-centrism and government cronyism. The days of the corporate-government alliance holding citizens at bay is ending! And while they'll fight like they are facing doom, they will be as happy as can be once there is no more ability to use abusive tactics to lock their hands in our wallets.
2008-10-17: Microsoft's Live Search Still Has To Buy Users
When you read about Microsoft's grand plans to make their "Live Search" the default search engine on the Web, you first think they are going to develop some improved algorithm that gives better results than their competitors' engines do. Then you open up your Hotmail to find a message like this:
Earn FREE rewards for something you do every day ?
search the Web!
Xbox® 360 controllers. Music downloads. Frequent flyer miles. Because we appreciate your use of Microsoft® Live Search, we'd
like to share with you an opportunity to earn tickets towards these and other exciting prizes when you join SearchPerks! from Microsoft.
? It's rewarding: Earn tickets toward exciting prizes for the Web
searches you do on properties powered by Live Search. Whether
it's on Live.com, MSN.com, Windows Live? Hotmail®, or Windows
Live Messenger.
? It's easy: With one simple download, we count your searches
automatically and award valuable tickets for each one,
up to 25 a day.
? It's brought to you by Microsoft Live Search: So you know
you won't compromise quality while earning rewards.
MSFT's problem in search (and the Web in general) is that they are primarily a proprietary software company. They think of all other businesses as ways to extend and maintain their dominance in operating system, Web browser, and office suite software.
Who can forget visiting MSN or MSNBC and being pushed to use Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player? Of the site rejecting users of the Opera Web browser? What was this about? It was about extending and maintaining the dominance of Microsoft's proprietary software.
Microsoft has had a similar problem in the search arena: their search results appeared to be skewed toward their own products and services, with scant mention of competing software and services. Granted, this was before the unveiling of Live Search. Now, with Live Search, I see that their MSNbot is one of the more active search spiders collecting information about sites.
Their search results are getting better and becoming less biased, but still generally worse than the results obtained using either Google or Yahoo! search.
For some people, paying them to use Live Search may work for a time. But eventually, most of them will leave again--It's the results, stupid!
If Microsoft wants to be seriously competitive in search, there are a few things they must do, most of which are antithetical to their whole proprietary emphasis:
- Advertising and search results must be clearly distinguishable. We understand that your search is ad-supported. But make sure that searchers can easily tell the difference between "sponsored results" and true search results.
- Search results should be unbiased. Be honest: Windows Vista is a giant turd. Make sure that honest evaluations of Vista's failings show up early in search results for the operating system. I realize that this will step on some toes within Microsoft, but maybe it will motivate someone to throw out the NT codebase and build the next version of Windows on NetBSD or a similar substrate.
- People come to Live Search to search. They come to MSN for news, information, and entertainment. They do not come there specifically to see your sponsors' ads. Therefore, never allow an advertisement to obstruct or interfere with the content that draws people to your site. I would extend this to ads that distract site visitors, such as the dancing cowboys ad and others that flash and move a lot; or which attempt to confuse or deceive them, such as the one that looks like a Windows application and says something like "You are user #7513. You win! Click here!"
- The age of a single operating system, browser, or media player dominating the market are coming to a close. People use many different systems, so everything you do should work equally well in any modern, standards-compliant product, including browsers such as lynx, which doesn't have display graphics or use scripting. This includes Microsoft's Hotmail service, which tries to get me to change browsers when I use Firefox, Opera, Epiphany, Flock, Konqueror, Kazehakase, or other modern browsers.
- Stop thinking that all Live Search needs is to buy Yahoo!'s share to be competitive. Remember that Live Search is the default search in the most widely-used browser that comes with the most widely-used operating system that comes with almost every computer you buy. Even when I change the search preference, the next person logging in still has Live Search as his or her default search. No, Microsoft's search woes are not due to anything other than 1 through 4, above. The situation will only change when those points above change. Whether MSFT buys YHOO or AOL or both,
I sincerely hope that Microsoft will begin to follow the above advice, including basing the next iteration of their software on NetBSD or a similar OS, especially if they release the resulting product under licensing that is compatible with free / libre and open source software. It would be nice to have real competition in search again. But this will not happen if search is subverted to support the agenda of a maker of proprietary software. Maybe then, Live Search will be a contender, part of a group of five to ten search engines with significant market share.
2008-08-31: Minor Comfort Is Still Comfort
August 2008 Web Server Survey - Netcraft
In the August 2008 survey we received responses from 176,748,506 sites. This month's overall growth of 1.3 million sites reflects Apache's growth of 1.2 million and Google's gain of half a million sites, but a loss of 760 thousand sites using Microsoft IIS.
Aside from Apache's and Google's leading growth, Igor Sysoev's nginx shows the next largest gain, climbing by 170 thousand sites to a new total of 2.4 million and retaining its position as the 5th largest web server vendor.
It is good to see Apache's dominance reduced from where it was a couple of years back, but it is still good to see that the growth of the leading proprietary (closed source) Web server's market share stalling and even reversing a little bit. It was somewhat disappointing to see lighttpd's share dropping, however, because it is the leading alternative FLOSS server. It would be good to have four or five different non-proprietary Web servers leading the pack, with closed-source proprietary software bringing up the rear.
The best news, of course, is that proprietary software is soon to be pushed to the edges of the market--to become niche products, instead of general-use products--but we cannot see it yet, not even in this market. There is still some growth in some proprietary products, and some proprietary products continue to have distinct advantages over some of their more open competitors. The power of community is erasing that advantage in most places it exists, but there is also corporate inertia to overcome. I would like to see most proprietary products pushed almost completely into special-purpose niches of server-side markets over the next ten or twenty years.
There will always be small, special-purpose areas where there is enough potential revenue to attract specialists who can sustain an advantage over their community-developed competitors for some long period of time. In the general market, however, the power of community-based development is so much that I cannot expect proprietary products to remain competitive much longer. Also, there are some smaller niche areas that are not able to support specialized proprietary developers, but may be able to support community-based development.
2008-08-17: "Mojave Experiment" Cannot Hide Vista's Failings
A Taste Of Vista II « Opportunity Knocks
So I went down to a retail store and picked up an HP something-or-other with 3GB of RAM.
Unfortunately, it came with Vista pre-installed. Fair enough. It has been a year since I last struggled with with it. Perhaps SP1 has fixed some of the most glaring issues.
First impression: All sorts of unwanted stuff is automatically starting, from first-run licensing wizards to ?update your software? wizards, to the ?welcome center?. Control-Alt-Delete will still let you bring up the task manager, which you can use to kill the wonderful tell-you-about-your-computer video. Now to turn off the welcome center?s run-at-startup function. Huh? Where is it? Oh, there it is, in the control panel. I realize that every application on the system (in addition to the operating system) needs to have someone accept the license. However, having them all pop up at once (modal dialog boxes, the most user-unfriendly thing on the planet) when you turn the computer on is not a good first impression.
My experience is not unique. Indeed, so many people dislike Vista that Microsoft has had to resort to "Pepsi challenge" type marketing to shore up its sagging sales. And it may even boost their sales, but it isn't the non-users of Vista they need to worry about--they should fear those who have used Windows XP, or Mac OS X, or any recent Linux distribution, who then get stuck with a Vista-powered computer. In particular, any "power user" who expects to have control of his or her computer will be disappointed in the tightly-restrictive "security nanny" nature of Vista.
Behind the glossy "Aero" interface (which many Vista computers, including mine, cannot display), Vista has little improvement in what it does for the end-user. Certainly nothing that was worth the several years of work that went into making Vista. Vista does improve its security posture (by ending the practice of defaulting to giving all system users full admin rights), which breaks many software programs--before, one could store user data and preferences in the program's folder, because most users had "write" privileges there. Still, "User Account Control" (UAC) is invasive and intrusive with its constant prompting. At the same time, those constant pop-ups teach users to ignore the message and just click "Allow". Apple was right with the "cancel or allow" advertisement last year.
Another area where many users have yet to discover Vista's built-in flaws is its technological usage restrictions (TUR, often euphemized as DRM). Without specific anti-theft technologies built into a connected device, playing high-quality audio or video through that device is not possible. There are already occasional anecdotes about not being able to play home-made video at high resolution because of this. It may take another year or two before this rises high enough in consumer consciousness to become a major obstacle to sales of Vista. Perhaps it will be too late by the time people become aware of the usage restrictions deeply embedded in the operating system.
Even with all of this built in, Vista is still susceptible to the "Antivirus XP 2008" malware. This means that as soon as someone figures out how to hijack the Windows Geniune Advantage snoopware to surreptitiously collect banking and identity information for the scammers, Vista will become a very fruitful field for them. To be honest, this malware also afflicts WinXP, as does the WGA snoopware, so rolling back to XP offers no protection against this threat.
Many people with Vista computers are replacing it with WinXP, with Linux, or buying Macs to replace the Vista. A tech guy at work was recently so disappointed with his new Vista laptop that he ordered a Mac and persuaded another person who was going to buy a laptop to go with a Mac as well. And I made no secret of my feelings toward my own Vista computer.
In fact, after playing around with Ubuntu on my HP laptop, I have now completely replaced all other operating systems with Ubuntu 8.04 AMD-64 desktop edition. I originally had the 32-bit x86 version, with less than half the hard drive. However, in the time since I installed Ubuntu, I booted into Windows three times, two of which were unsuccessful searches for a specific file, and the third was to burn the restore partition to DVD in case I transfer the computer to someone who really wants Windows Vista.
2008-03-28: OOXML Battle Continuing Toward Deadline
In fact, Bill Gates himself went to Washington DC to lobby (successfully, I might add) INCITS to vote its approval of this flawed standard becoming ISO certified.
Microsoft OOXML Format rejected by India ? D' Technology Weblog: Technology, Blogging, Tips, Tricks, Computer, Hardware, Software, Tutorials, Internet, Web, Gadgets, Fashion, LifeStyle, Entertainment, News and more by Deepak Gupta.
The BIS LITD 15 Committee has rejected
Microsoft?s document format OOXML. According to sources, out of 19
members, five of them did not attend the meeting, one of them
abstained, five voted in favour of OOXML and the rest voted against.
The meeting took place today in Delhi at the BIS office.
I realize that Rick Jelliffe believes that opposing the ISO-ification of OOXML (DIS29500) is all anti-Microsoft hysteria, but I believe that most of us (and certainly myself) would heartily endorse a standard that was truly open, with truly safe intellectual property rights requirements, and truly specified behavior and which was going to be used in exactly the same form by Microsoft's own products. Particularly for public sector usage, there are, or should be, stricter requirements to be met by a standard.
In my opinion, Mr. Jelliffe is in the wrong. Not because OOXML should be perfect, but because it should be implementable by parties other than its sponsor, without fear of legal action or being locked out by unspecified secret sauce or choked in superfluous (and deprecated) details. Because it fails this test, it needs to be sent back for changes, even changes incompatible with the present implementation in MS Office 2007. OOXML should not be an anti-competitive weapon, but a means to bring multiple vendors' data files into compatibility.
We know that the age when one could keep data and source code locked up and charge hundreds of times the cost of development is ending, and that multiple well-known software companies must adapt or die. The OOXML standards push was at first an attempt to forestall this reality, but it will not accomplish this. Openness will continue to grow, despite any obstacles. Eventually, even Microsoft will be forced to change.
Technorati Tags: ooxml, open standards, dis29500
2007-09-02: Apache Actually Declines
The August 2007 Netcraft Web server survey shows Apache losing a number of sites, going from 66144734 to 65153417. This 1.5% decline, 991317 sites in one month, shows up as a drop in market share (-1.73%).
Apache still has about 23 million more sites than IIS. Put this another way, Apache currently has about 1.5 times as many sites as IIS.
These figures include parked sites. In active sites, the results are even closer. Apache has 1.29 parked sites for each active site. IIS has 1.05 parked sites for each active site.
I believe that this is both bad news and good news. The surge in growth for IIS portends ill for those whose sites are developed using non-Microsoft technologies (such as this one). It really speaks to the chosen platforms of the big hosting companies, and it indicates that many of them are promoting their Windows hosting services above their heretofore popular LAMP platform hosting services.
On the other hand, Lighttpd is finally being counted. For too long, the whole FLOSS world hid behind Apache. Because of surveys like Netcraft's, it was important to hide the true platform and put more clout behind Apache. Otherwise, the proprietary give-us-the-control crowd would be crowing about their presumed victory. While they may yet do this within a year or two, I think the fact that lighttpd is now counted shows us the way forward: common standards, diverse implementations. I look forward to having a dozen free and open source Web servers with enough market share to be included in the surveys.
This does require that we make sure standards are clear and concise, including specifying extension mechanisms and how one should deal with unknown extensions.
Finally, I notice that the Security Space survey shows quite different results,
2007-05-21: Apache Loses Share, Now 56%
This month's numbers are a little less positive for Apache. In part, this is due to Netcraft attempting to make their reports more accurate and detailed. In recent months, they have started reporting the share of Lighttpd, for example. Prior to this, at least one site spoofed lighttpd as Apache, so that it would be counted in some FLOSS server instead of being ignored.
This month's decline in Apache's share is explained this way by Netcraft:
With this month's survey, Netcraft has begun tracking Google's custom web server software known as GFE (Google Front End), which is currently found on 2.7 million hostnames, or 2.3% of all sites.... The GFE hostnames had previously been grouped under Apache, which sees a reduction in sites. As a result, Apache's market share slips by 2.86 percent to 56 percent ....I do not know whether GFE began as an Apache derivative, so I have no opinion as to whether this improves the accuracy of the survey's division of its results into server software product "families", such as Apache (which, I believe, includes 1.x and 2.x branches as well as derivatives such as Advanced Extranet Server and Stronghold) and Microsoft (includes IIS and PWS).
I notice that Apache still grew in the number of active sites using the platform, to 31,896,813.
Lighttpd, mentioned above, is also FLOSS, so we wish to see it continue to grow both in the number and percentage of sites hosted with the software.
2007-05-02: Apache Gets Small Gain
The monthly Netcraft Web server survey for April 2007 showed that Apache Web server and its derivatives managed to gain some market share compared to the March survey. Apache now has 58.86% of the market, a 0.24% share increase from the prior month. By comparison, the nearest competitor, Microsoft's IIS (and other Microsoft products) had 31.13%, an increase of 0.11% from the prior survey. Until the beginning of 2006, Apache was approaching an 80% share, while IIS was struggling to stay near 20%.
Apache is an example of FLOSS being superior to it proprietary competition.
We believe that FLOSS (Free / Libré and Open Source Software) is the wave of the future. Soon, all proprietary software companies will need to accommodate FLOSS in their design and marketing, or be kicked to the curb as unusable.
