Criticizing GOOG and MSFT with Angel Feathers
June 3, 2009
ComputerWorld lives on advertising and happy tech companies. However, throwing praise at Microsoft’s Bing Kumo and Google’s Wave does little to set the publication’s “voice” apart. An article that finds fault with Bing and Wave is just what is needed. But there’s a problem. Get too critical and ad dollars and hot tips may go elsewhere. Even more chilling is a letter from Bing Kumo’s or Google’s legal eagles. The result is what I call “angel feather” analysis. A downside is identified but presented in a very upbeat, chipper way. After all, who wants hassles if you are trying to make a go of a publishing business today.
Check out “Bashing Bing, Whacking Wave” here. The weakness of Bing Kumo is that it makes decisions for a user. Too many decisions leave the user in the dark about what’s included and excluded. The flaw in Wave is that it arrives with Google’s legacy and a new fondness for bloat.
Both of these are important points, but ComputerWorld stops short of spelling out what the business implications are of these increasingly similar companies’ approach to online information.
I am going to follow in ComputerWorld’s footprints. I think both services are just swell. The addled goose does not want to know how results are shaped. Furthermore, the need to arm wrestle complicated systems as Google sucks metadata from the human interactions with data is super cool.
Love both services to death.
Stephen Arnold, June 2, 2009
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
