Microsoft to stay its China course despite Google spat
March 08, 2010
Source: REUTERS

BEIJING: Microsoft said on Friday it will stick to its development strategy for the China Internet search market regardless of the outcome of Google's high-profile spat with Beijing. Microsoft has kept a relatively low profile in China since Google announced its decision to potentially withdraw from the market over censorship issues and following an attack on its systems that it believes originated in China.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer previously said his company had no plans to pull out of China, indicating it was unlikely to follow Google's lead in challenging a Chinese system that forces Internet firms to self censor their sites on sensitive topics.

"Regardless of whether or not Google stays, we will aggressively promote our search and cloud computing (in China)," Zhang Yaqin, chairman of Microsoft's Asia-Pacific R&D Group, said on Friday on the sidelines of the opening of the National People's Congress in Beijing. Zhang added that Microsoft plans to spend about $500 million on research and development in China this year, and another $150 million on outsourced projects.

It’s time to stop playing blind man’s bluff
March 08, 2010
Source: IST

E-mailing has become a huge part of our lives. An important element of emailing which has evolved, involves the concepts of cc and bcc. Who we mark mails to often defines our personality and working style at the workplace, more so the latter.

BCC, an acronym for Blind Carbon Copy or even Blind Courtesy Copy has, these days, degenerated into an acronym for Blind Co-Conspirator. What is this BCC and why has it become so important?

In the context of correspondence, Wikipedia refers to bcc as the practice of sending a message to multiple recipients in such a way that it conceals individual email addresses from the complete list of recipients.

BCC is normally beneficial when you are sending mails to multiple recipients, for example a newsletter or invitations and you do not want the recipients, for the sake of privacy, to know the identity or email IDs of the other recipients. Furthermore, you do not want to run the risk of one of the recipient doing a “reply all” to everyone, and clogging the email traffic. Is this the only reason why bcc is used these days?

“Naah! “says Michael Deodhar, a management trainee with an FMCG major. “These days BCC has become a potent weapon in the arsenal of political manipulators to get even with others. It has become as much of a ‘cover your ass’ tool as it has become a perception management contrivance. BCC in my office gets used these days when one has tell his boss or other members of the management team that he is on top of things”, adds Michael, when asked if bcc is an appropriate thing to do.

Not everyone concurs with Michael. “BCC is a form of deception”, says Rimi, a HR executive. “If you do not want to let the receiver of the email know that the mail has been bcc’d to someone else, who could be a senior, a peer or in extreme cases even a junior, then you are not playing clean with the other person. It is a matter of trust. Why will I even trust someone who plays these kind of games?” she argues.

If it is ethically and morally draining, why do people bcc for reasons other than convenience? “Could be many” says Aniruddh.

“For one, if I want to let my boss know what all I am doing during my normal day, what better way than a bcc. It helps escalate issues, flag off concerns without really letting the other person know that the issue has been escalated. Further, in this age when information is key, and the one who knows more wins almost all the battles, a bcc will only strengthen the arms of the person who is supplied the information. Most importantly, from the perspective of the person who is sending the bcc mail, it demonstrates complete allegiance to the person being bcc’d and hence there are obvious long-term career gains to be had,” says an emphatic Aniruddh.

However, the bcc game is a dangerous one, particularly if the person one is bcc-ing is not a party to this game. All it takes is one “reply all” from the bcc’d person to let the whole world know, inadvertently though, that you had bcc’d him. This can be rather embarrassing for the original sender, who deliberately tried to hide the fact that he had bcc’d someone. Who knows what can of political worms will get opened by this?

To me, bcc is an inappropriate thing to do unless your intent is honest, which unfortunately it is not in 90% of the bcc’d cases. If you believe in an open, truthful, straight and fair approach to your work life, then stand up and have the courage to do a cc so that the person who is the recipient knows who all are aware of the contents of the mail. That’s the only correct etiquette of writing and marking mails and an appropriate conduct at the workplace. Anything else is pure deception, morally inapt and will eventually lead to erosion of trust in you as a professional worker.

Search engines may be faster but not precise enough
March 08, 2010
SOURCE: TNN

For all those who use Google to search the web, and most of us probably do, here’s a quick question. Have you ever hit the “I’m feeling lucky button” on the search engine and accessed the results? For the uninitiated, the button takes you directly to the number one result your query fetched.

Whether it’s the answer you were searching for depends entirely on your luck, hence the “I am feeling lucky” tag. Ironically, this is true of most web search results today.

Search engines may be speedy but are they precise enough? “Not necessarily. There is still a lot of confusion there,” says usability professional, Manish Sinha, whose work involves providing suggestions to websites to improve the user’s browsing experience.

Sinha says that ambiguity creeps in because a user gets results that largely depend on the keywords used. “For example, if you type in windows, the results would range from the Microsoft software to the windows in homes. Similarly, if you type Paris, the search could show the city as well as Hilton, the socialite.”

Most search engines are aware of this. Google has recently started pre-empting the user by suggesting keyword combinations that could fetch the best results. Anurag Dod, founder of Guruji.com, an India-specific search engine, says this is an indication of how much internet search is advancing. “The question those in the internet search business are asking today is, how best to divine the user’s intent and provide him exactly what he’s searching for,” he says.

There are no easy answers. Search engines like Google are based on an algorithm mechanism. This is a complex mathematical formula that crawls through billions of sites on the net and ranks its pages, thereby creating a vast index that is tapped to deliver search results. “Considering that the internet is growing at a frantic pace, and new pages are continuously being added, it’s a challenge to constantly index fresh pages and produce results that are new and pertinent,” admits Dod.

Often, experimentation is the key. Google has experimented with what it terms the Universal search. This blends listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines to deliver comprehensive results. Vinay Goel, head of products, Google India, says that Universal search is an important first step in exploring the full range of what can be achieved.

“Users today are looking at compact and personalized results. Search engines have to understand this and be more intuitive. The future will see radical advances in modes of search. Our goal is to take advantage of these and keep evolving the interface design and user experience.”

Bing, Microsoft’s search portal, launched last year as the “decision engine” has similar aspirations of developing as a search engine that can offer solutions, not just plain vanilla search results. Eventually, say Microsoft sources, the idea is to pull out specific bits of information from different web pages and serve them up as one result. This will be quite different from the way it works now, where an engine lists a choice of many pages, each of which contains the keywords searched for.

Already, search engines like Wolfram Alpha are employing the model of delivering answers, rather than pointing the direction. Google chairman Eric Schmidt admitted some time ago that the industry was moving towards a scenario where search engines will not just search information, but process it and provide a single answer to the user that will, in an ideal world, be 100% correct.

However, it’ll take time for this to become reality. In the meantime, search engines will have to contend with the increasing verticalization of the web. Or more specifically, the rise of vertical search engines in areas like jobs, travel etc, that are more focused and deliver better results.

For the user though, internet search will only get better. Already, the effects are visible in areas like Search engine optimization (SEO), the mechanism by which webmasters ensure their websites get higher ranking in search results. “The days are over when webmasters used to spam their code with keywords to get recognition from search engines,” says Kapil Gupta of Synapse India, a software firm that specializes in SEO.

“Nowadays algorithms of search engines have become smarter with integrated artificial intelligence. There’s no doubt that the search domain is getting more and more user-oriented and will continue to do so.”