What’s Microsoft Gotten into Now? Search Me! - New Technologies
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So Microsoft is starting smaller and somewhat specialized, with something called Newsbot. Reportedly in beta in several countries (but not the US -- at least, not yet), the program depends on the principles of artificial intelligence and information retrieval. It keeps track of what you've already seen, so it doesn't show you the same stuff all over again. It's also supposed to get a feel for the stuff you like to read about, so it can make intelligent suggestions for what news to read. Eventually, the company wants to make it possible for users to ask natural language questions -- like, say, which companies' stock went up by more that 15 points today -- and get real answers, not garbage.
Microsoft isn't stopping with the news, though. Something called Blogbot, designed to aggregate content from Web logs, is reportedly in alpha. And -- quite honestly, without rancor -- I wish them the best of luck. I know for a fact that there's all sorts of cool information out there in blogs, but I never have the time to investigate it myself. If anybody can come up with a way to let people get at that information easily, reliably, and fairly painlessly, they'd be doing humanity a great service (or at least, the portion of humanity that's either directly or indirectly online).
Here is where what I said earlier about the non-settlement with the European Union comes in. For those who may not be familiar with that bit of news, seems the European Commission spent five years investigating Microsoft and found it guilty of unfair competition -- to wit, taking advantage of its monopoly on the desktop to push its own workgroup servers and multimedia player software, while crowding would-be competitors out of those markets. Seems Microsoft bundled that software in with the Windows operating system, for free -- just like it did with its browser. At any rate, last minute attempts to negotiate a settlement did not succeed, so the EC slapped Microsoft with fines and sanctions, and Microsoft is swearing it will appeal the case.
Next: Europe to MS: "It's Not Going to Work Out" >>
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