Lately, all the media services have been buzzing about new projects of the big boys (Microsoft, Google). The whole big fuss is about the sea of possibilities that those companies would like to offer to the internet society. How could this change the internet as we know it and especially the social services?
A wave comes crashing in…
First and probably the most exciting of the new projects is Google Wave. The whole concept was presented to the larger public at the end of May 2009. This could seem as yet another social communication and collaboration tool. But behind the companies slogan “how would an e-mail look if it was invented today” hides a very powerful and life-easing piece of software.
“How would this help me ?” – you could ask. First of all, this will greatly speed up the process of sending and receiving emails, communicating with your friends and even sharing files. Secondly, the interface looks just very eye-pleasing and who wouldn’t want to work in a nice and clean workspace. And most of all Google and its Gmail service are the most popular providers of such a service and them taking a step forward means this could change the way we communicate.
B(l)ing B(l)ing
The second projects are Microsoft’s Bing. Obviously, in terms of search engines, Google is still the number one, leaving Yahoo and Live Search far behind. Despite all the efforts of Microsoft to make Live Search more popular, they have admitted failure. But when it was certain that they gave up, there came Bing. The hopefully more popular successor of Live Search.
Microsoft decided not to compete with Google in their own field of expertise. Instead, they focused on intelligent results – simple and organised. Bing is useful to help you with your decisions. Grouping the results in logical and dynamic sections and giving you the most valuable data directly on one page. The world is just one click away. Summing it all up, Microsoft’s Bing doesn’t and probably they do not want to outperform Google. Instead of delivering a search engine they’ve decided to introduce the world to a new decision engine.