Google’s U.S. market share rose 0.1 percentage point to 66.5 percent in April from the prior month. Microsoft’s share also edged up 0.1 percentage point to 15.4 percent last month. Yahoo Inc.’s sites remained in the No. 3 spot, slipping 0.2 percentage points to 13.5 percent. IAC/InterActiveCorp.’s Ask.com’s share and AOL Inc.’s shares were unchanged at 3 percent and 1.6 percent, respectively.

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We’re literally no longer indexing text. We’re trying to associate data that exists on the web in all forms with the physical object that spawned it in the first place.

– Bing director Stefan Weitz, in an interview with Fast Company’s E.B. Boyd

The new Bing features a three-panel layout, with the left-most a pared-down list of straight search results. The second column appears when users hover over a certain result, and shows dedicated visual results for 150 different categories like restaurants, transit, movies and hotels that include maps, ratings and other information.

This “Snapshot” screen tries to help users take action on those results — for instance, to make a restaurant reservation or check availability at a certain hotel — without leaving the Bing page.

The third column is the most radical change from the traditional search layout — it’s a social friend list and feed that stays on the page at all times over to the right. For each query, Bing will automatically suggest Facebook friends who know about a topic as well as relevant experts from Twitter, Foursquare, Quora, LinkedIn, Google+ and Blogger.

When a user asks one of those people to help with a query, the conversation shows up in an activity feed on the sidebar and also back on Facebook.

Microsoft had considered giving users the option to broadcast — with their permission — all their Bing search queries to Facebook through its Open Graph API. That would have been super controversial, and it was dropped from the release over the last couple of weeks.

Bing search director Stefan Weitz told me that there are a couple of goals for this launch. The first is to show users that “Bing is for doing stuff.” And the second is to acknowledge that search has become too crowded, with additions like social seeming to randomly sprinkle Facebook profile photos throughout the results page.

The new interface’s three panels are, in order, “what the Web knows,” “what Bing knows,” and “what friends know,” Weitz said.

One thing that’s not clear to me is how a three-panel design that’s dependent on hovering will work within the constraints of small mobile touchscreens. Microsoft is demoing that and more at a San Francisco launch event that’s being live-streamed here.

Update: Qi Lu, Microsoft’s president of online services, replied at the event that the three-panel approach should actually ease translations to various form factors, including phones and Xboxes.

“Separating aspects allows us to customize for different form factors, so the experience can be consistent,” he said. Lu added that hovering would be replaced by swiping between panes on mobile devices.

The new Bing won’t be available to all users immediately, but people can sign up to be notified about it here.

I’ve written my own critiques of Google. But the big G is more on par with Microsoft, IBM and other perennial brands than with Myspace. Google may have its ups and downs, but it’s not going anywhere.

Here’s why:

Google is a utility, not a toy

Google isn’t just a fun toy. It has become a utility for the vast majority of Internet users. It’s a major driver of commerce for businesses. And it collects and redistributes data in a way that no other tool or site has been able to replicate.

Myspace wasn’t a utility. It was a place where teenagers gathered to trade messages. Bing and Yahoo? They never approached the market share — or the effectiveness — needed to become as important.

Google has become a tool we constantly use. It’s integrated into web browsers and phones, and now it’s testing the waters of wearable computing. It powers the flow of content around the Internet. And it isn’t going anywhere.

Social isn’t a “new way of thinking”

Jackson says that Google’s failure to move into social media (we can debate that) is a major weakness, because social media and the structures it creates are replacing search:

Why has Amazon done so little in social? And Google? Even as they pour billions into the problem, their primary business model which made them successful in the first place seems to override their expansion into some new way of thinking.
There are a few problems with this statement:

• Social isn’t replacing search. It can’t, any more than a walnut can replace a bicycle. Social and search are completely different: Social media generates content and relationships. Search engines help us sift through content and relationships. There’s very little overlap.
• Social media isn’t new. It has been around since AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy. Truthfully, it’s been around since humans could communicate. It’s not disruptive. The ways innovators apply it is disruptive. But that application doesn’t threaten Google.
• Google is desperately clawing at social media because the publicly traded company needs revenue growth, and because it wants to tap social media as another portion of its search algorithm.

Social really does not pose a threat to Google. If Facebook were to introduce a first-rate search engine, that might reduce Google’s market share. But even that wouldn’t drive it out of existence.

People

Even with its post-IPO brain drain, Google has an unparalleled ability to attract and retain top-rate engineers. Google is a unique engineer’s paradise, if you like the environment there. Between its culture and the mountain of cash upon which it sits, Google can have first or second pick of the best talent in the industry.

Until it becomes a truly entrenched, mature corporation with all of the baggage that brings, no one can really touch Google’s talent pool.

What could destroy Google

There is one potential Google-killer out there: Legal action.

Google’s moving into dangerous territory and could end up getting carved up through government action:

• It dominates search, and isn’t afraid to use that dominance to acquire some competitors, crush others and generally move the industry as it sees fit.
• It has access to mountains of analytics data across different online channels, and can potentially use that data in ways that should give regulators hives.
• Its promotion of Google+ seems awfully similar to Microsoft’s promotion of Internet Explorer 2001-2005. It has locked out other social networks when it controls more than 85 percent of the search world. That alone might force antitrust action.

The federal government could, if forced, order Google to break up into separate units around search, social, applications and email. Or it could force the company to completely abandon some initiatives. That would be nearly unprecedented. But then again, so is Google.

Ian Lurie is CEO of Portent Inc., an Internet marketing agency that he founded in 1995. He co-published Web Marketing All-In-One for Dummies and wrote the sections on SEO, blogging, social media and web analytics. He also wrote Conversation Marketing: Internet Marketing Strategies.

Starting today, Decide.com will choose 10 deals that it is so sure about that if its prediction proves wrong and the price drops within two weeks of purchase, Decide will automatically alert the buyer and pay them the amount of the price drop (up to $200).

The new feature is being launched today by the Seattle company, which is the brainchild of the folks behind Farecast.com. Like Decide.com, Farecast predicted whether it was the right time to buy an airline ticket. Farecast is now part of Microsoft’s Bing. Unfortunately, Farecast never had a guarantee.

In a statement, Mike Fridgen, president and CEO of Decide, said: “We want to show our users this isn’t just lip service — we’re actually willing to put our money behind our data-driven recommendations.”

The guarantee will be applied to 10 designated deals on the site every day, from consumer electronics to refrigerators and videogames.

Today’s deals include an HP 14-inch laptop for $500, representing a 23 percent savings; a 55-inch HDTV from LG that costs $1,199, representing a savings of 37 percent; and the Haier 1.7 cubic-foot refrigerator for $80, representing a 20 percent savings.

If any of those products become cheaper over the next two weeks, a buyer needs only to submit a photo of themselves with the product, and then Decide will send the money via PayPal or check.

While it sounds generous, the program probably pencils out financially, too. Of course, Decide hopes that its predictions are correct, but if they aren’t, the company has some buffer, because it earns a commission on the sales it generates.

To be clear, the company is not partnering with the retailer on these deals, but it does earn a referal fee or commission from the retailer if it generates a sale. Some of those rates are hefty; Amazon, for example, pays 4 percent on electronics product referrals.

Since launching last June, Decide says it has served up more than seven million recommendations, which have resulted in an average savings of $87 per product.

According to the latest comScore report, search dominator Google continued to do so in the U.S. market, upping its share to 66.4 percent in February, from 66.2 percent in the month before.

This marked the third month Google’s search share rose, improvement also enjoyed by Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Its share rose to 15.3 percent, said comScore, from 15.2 percent in January. That is up from 13.6 percent a year ago.

The rise comes at the expense of Microsoft advertising partner Yahoo, which saw its market share fall to 13.8 percent. It was 14.1 percent a month ago, and 16.1 percent a year ago.

This is, as you might imagine, not good news for Yahoo, which relies on income from its once-mighty search business. It’s better news for Microsoft, of course, although it still pays big-time in costs for the wins it is making from Bing.

In fact, Bing is now the only search engine that has explicit deals to access data from both Facebook and Twitter.

But it’s not like Bing is the all-social, all-the-time search engine. In fact, Bing has been oddly reticent about incorporating social data into its results, especially considering that Twitter and Facebook themselves have relatively poor search offerings.

This morning I asked Bing Search director Stefan Weitz what the deal was. Here’s an edited write-up of our conversation.

Liz Gannes: What’s the status of social search at Bing?

Stefan Weitz: We’ve been blending social signals for 18 months now, even just to do things like detecting possible spikes when we see lots of tweets coming in on a certain topic. And we have a separate SERP — a separate page — where you can see social results.

The first thing is, we are taking this pretty slow, and there’s a pretty good reason for that. People don’t understand how amazingly complex it is to make sense of any social signal. So we are being very conservative about where we fire social results.

That’s the first thing; the second thing is there’s more than likes and shares. It’s more about augmenting this mechanical product — the algorithmic search engine — with people. So we shipped things like understanding the cities where you live, friends’ opinions on stock quotes — a bunch of things besides just firing off social search.

Do you think it makes sense for search engines to pay to access social data?

I’m not on the business side, but I think for search to work properly, you have to understand that if a missing component has to be included, you have to [make a deal for] it.

Has social search positively impacted the Bing experience? Are there measurable impacts of social users being more satisfied with their results?

For sure — the biggest thing we see is when you look on the search page and see the faces [of your friends], the click-through rate goes up substantially. It goes back to basic neuroscience: We pay attention to people. The core user experience has gotten a ton better, and it’s very early. We’ve taken a while to do this, but it’s complex.

What in particular is complex?

Figuring out what does a “Like” mean, what does a share mean. Originally we were going to fire off “Stefan likes this result” even if there’s a comment. But what if I say in the comment, “This article’s totally wrong.” On one hand I have the “Like,” on the other hand I have the lexical comment. Or I might be retweeting it from someone else, or I might have just thought it was funny. Trying to understand that very atomic action is hard.

Bing's Stefan Weitz says search is better with faces.

We’ve found it’s important to look at the whole person and understand “Stefan likes to share on computer science, and he has an interest in spatial dynamics.” On Twitter search we will identify experts on a certain topic. That’s something we can do but we don’t do that on any scale yet.

Why aren’t you doing more to capitalize on the goodwill from people who dislike Google’s Search Plus Your World? Shouldn’t you be mounting a “switch to Bing” campaign?

We are doing some ads this week (There was also a Bing-is-great blog post today). They [Google] are doing a nice job on their own of handling this problem.

But they are learning just like we are. They did what we didn’t want to do, which was make the user experience peppered with this stuff, with +1s everywhere, the Google+ content in the top corner. I think [Google] realized we were ahead and they overextended. But I know a ton of guys there and they’re smart and they’re reacting to what has been said.

What would happen if Microsoft had its own significant social network? How would that change your relationship to other social networking sites? Would you be tempted to give preference to your own on-network content?

Well, we do have Windows Live, which has half a billion accounts — though not a lot of social activity because we have linked to 25 or 40 other social network profiles for years.

I remember the discussion a few years ago that, even though we had a very robust social product, there were 60+ social networks across the planet. We thought, it’s naive to assume a single social network will rule them all or to make people come to ours. So we have the guys running around doing partnerships with 60 different networks.

Us partnering is the only way we’re going to make a big difference here. We have to use the whole web to actualize our vision of helping people do stuff, not just find stuff. And everyone wins, which is nice.

Can you explain what you get through these deals? What information is accessible through data feeds that isn’t through regular crawling?

Just from a technical standpoint, crawling is expensive. We could certainly hit a site a thousand times a minute, but it’s not efficient. Feeds just generally are more efficient. And also crawling doesn’t necessarily have a structured data set.

What about getting access to analyze each user’s social graph, something Google has said is very important?

Certainly having a social graph is a good thing for Facebook, which has an amazing amount of data. There’s also people I follow on Twitter, which is a public record. But different friends are valuable for different things — one single network can’t rule them all.

When are you going to press your social advantage in Bing, seeing as you have both Facebook and Twitter deals and Google doesn’t?

You’re going to see the culmination of a lot of our learnings in the not too distant future. All those lessons will be applied into something that I think is pretty interesting. How we think about social is always evolving, and the next turn of the crank is more differentiated than we’ve seen in the past.

Nerd fight!

Blake Ross

A weekend coding effort, led by Facebook rabble-rouser Blake Ross, gave birth to a browser bookmarklet called “don’t be evil” that rewrites Google’s personalized search results to include content from other social networks. (Ross’s official title is Director of Product, and he was previously a co-founder of Firefox.)

Ross said engineers from Twitter and Myspace also helped out with the bookmarklet, but he didn’t name them. The group launched a Web site today, at focusontheuser.org.

This gets slightly complicated, but you can install the bookmarklet yourself in Chrome, Firefox and Safari, or watch a video about how it works. After you do a normal Google search with personalized results turned on, you can click on the bookmarklet to get an updated version of the results that includes links to Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Quora, Tumblr, Foursquare, CrunchBase, FriendFeed, Stack Overflow, GitHub and Google+.

I ran into a bunch of hiccups when I tried the bookmarklet out in Chrome, but it worked pretty smoothly in Firefox.

Here’s the background: A couple of weeks ago, when it launched “Search plus Your World” by default for English-language users, Google said that other social networks like Facebook and Twitter don’t let it crawl deeply enough to provide “secure and consistent access” to their users’ private content. So, SPYW could, for the most part, only include Google+ content.

That’s a bit of a ruse, because there’s lots of public content from social networks that Google already indexes. It’s not hard to find Twitter handles and LinkedIn profiles in Google search results. When SPYW launched, Twitter loudly called foul, and people at Facebook complained more quietly.

The thing is, SPYW doesn’t just give preference to private Google+ content in personalized search results. It also actively promotes Google+ profiles and other public content in various locations throughout the search page.

Google+ profiles — but not content from any other social network — now show up in a new “People and Pages” box that sometimes appears in place of ads on the right side of Google’s search-results page, as a type-ahead suggested query within the search box, and interspersed high up in search results for many brands.

Ross and his buddies used Google’s own organic search results and “Rich Snippets” tool to find the social network content that Google already indexes and ranks normally. The bookmarklet then integrates those diverse results into places where Google+ content is exclusively promoted.

This was an independent and unofficial effort, but Facebook is hardly disavowing it. In fact, a Facebook spokesman praised Ross’s voice-over talent (that’s him speaking in the video) in an email to AllThingsD.

While this feistiness makes for a fun story, the moral high ground might be a dangerous spot for Ross to claim.

Facebook notoriously hoards its members’ friend graphs and user emails, doling out access only to partners that it doesn’t see as direct competitors. Users who wish to remove and transport their data to another service are stifled at every turn.

Further, Facebook limits access to search engines, having required Microsoft’s Bing to sign a deal to access content that’s mostly public already. And it’s not like the company provides its own democratic search engine to compete with Google.

(Photo credit: Flickr user StampyTurtle)

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Well, on the surface, at least. Multiple stories about Google and Facebook’s 2009 failed negotiations over a search deal can clearly be traced back to Facebook.

Facebook says it couldn’t come to terms with Google over how to handle private content; Google says Facebook wanted a clause that would have prevented Google from building its own social service.

Meanwhile, Facebook employees criticized Google’s moves in public status updates. Several prominent Facebookers shared and endorsed a Gizmodo article by Mat Honan about switching his default search engine to Bing after “Google broke itself.”

They included Pedram Keyani, an engineering manager who is a frequent public face of Facebook; Paul Adams, the former Google user experience researcher whose ideas about social circles were famously influential there, but who left for Facebook before Google+ launched; and Joe Lockhart, the former White House press secretary, who is now Facebook’s VP of global communications.

Keyani wrote of the Gizmodo story:

This is a pretty interesting read. Google became something we love because they always focused on speed and giving us the best results. They have made a pretty big departure from that with their most recent change.

They say fear is a great motivator (fear of facebook and twitter) but I think in this case it has also clouded their vision.

Google was my first real fulltime job the direction they are moving in makes me sad. I hope they find their way.

Bing, by the way, did end up signing that 2009 Facebook search deal that Google backed out of — and besides that, Microsoft is an investor in Facebook. Bing passed Yahoo to finally become the second-place U.S. search provider in December.

(Image courtesy of Flickr user thepeachmartini)

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

And that puts Bing in second place behind Google in the market researcher’s search rankings. For the month of December, the search sovereign carved out a nearly 66 percent share of the market.

In other words, the gap between first and second place in search remains massive, and there’s a lot of work yet to be done to narrow it. Even accounting for the “Powered by Bing” results of Microsoft’s chimeric partner-rival Yahoo, Bing still had only a 26.5 percent share.

Most prominently, Twitter General Counsel Alex Macgillivray called the launch a “bad day for the Internet.” Though obviously his loyalties lie with Twitter, it’s a particularly notable charge given “Amac” was previously a lawyer for Google.

Bad day for the Internet. bit.ly/Am5bqz Having been there, I can imagine the dissension @Google to search being warped this way.

— Alex Macgillivray (@amac) January 10, 2012

Macgillivray linked to a blog post by John Battelle (who wrote the book “The Search” about Google) that said, “Ick. Remember when Google used to be a neutral player that crawled the Whole Dern Web? So sad to see that era pass.”

Elsewhere, pro-blogger-turned-VC MG Siegler waved the antitrust flag, while NYU law professor James Grimmelmann wrote, “Today is a good day to turn off Google+ and delete your Google Profile. I just did.”

Alexis Madrigal of the Atlantic added, “I just can’t help but wonder whether Google’s new social mission and the original Google mission will keep coming into conflict. And in the race to protect its flank from Facebook, Google will lose track of why we loved them in the first place.”

Google is now encouraging users to "upgrade to Google+"

When I asked Google yesterday about why it didn’t include services like Facebook and Google in search, Google Fellow Ben Gomes replied, “The key thing here is we only have access to content on Google. We’re open to other types of content, but in order to provide secure and consistent access, we can only provide what’s in Google, where we know the privacy settings and have the relevant graph and signals.”

As for the actual “Search plus Your World” features that Google promised today for English-speaking users of Google.com, they don’t seem to be available yet for many people. However, Google is already promoting the feature on its U.S. home page, and prompting people who click through to “Upgrade to Google+.” (Having a Google+ account isn’t required for the new personal search features, but obviously it enhances the experience.)

Asked for a timetable for the launch, a Google spokesperson said, “It started rolling out this morning and will roll out to everyone over the next couple days.” She did not give an estimate for how many users have the features so far.

Update: Twitter Complains About Google Giving Preference to Google+ Content

Earlier this week, Google and Mozilla said they had struck a deal to renew their search royalty agreement for another three years.

What the pair declined to add: The search giant will pay just under $300 million per year to be the default choice in Mozilla’s Firefox browser, a huge jump from its previous arrangement, due to competing interest from both Yahoo and Microsoft.

Sources said this total amount — just under $1 billion — was the minimum revenue guarantee for delivering search queries garnered from consumers using Firefox.

Google’s main rival in the bid, sources said, was Microsoft’s Bing search service, which was aggressively trying to hip-check it from the main search spot on the browser.

That’s because the software giant has been spending a lot of money in efforts to grow Bing’s market share in the search market.

Microsoft, of course, also owns the still-dominant Internet Explorer browser, but Google’s Chrome has recently been making major gains over both IE and Mozilla’s Firefox.

Still, Mozilla’s recent negotiations with both companies was about search market share.

Yahoo was also in the mix, even though Microsoft powers its search technology, because a hookup with Firefox was considered a plus in holding on to its declining search market share.

But the deal, which was being pushed hard by Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer Blake Irving and its search head Shashi Seth, was determined to be too costly for Yahoo.

Costly indeed, since the new price is much higher than Google had previously ponied up to Mozilla. In 2010, Google contributed 84 percent of Mozilla’s $123 million in revenue.

A previous version of the partnership had expired at the end of November, and the new talks were done against a backdrop of simmering tension between Google and Mozilla over Chrome.

As Liz Gannes wrote earlier this week:

Since the first search royalty deal was signed in 2008, Google’s own Chrome browser has become a significant competitor. Just last month, Chrome overtook Firefox in global usage for the first time, according to StatCounter. Both browsers — software which is used to navigate the Internet — have about 25 percent market share.

Even with the new default deal with Google, Mozilla still also has partnerships with other search providers, including Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon and eBay.

Of course, everybody declined to comment on my queries to hand over all the financial deets stat.

But Google’s SVP of Search, Alan Eustace, said in a statement: “Mozilla has been a valuable partner to Google over the years and we look forward to continuing this great partnership in the years to come.”

Great, perhaps, but also much more expensive — so presumably Firefox is worth it.

Mozilla is set to announce that it has signed a new three-year agreement for Google to be the default search option in its Firefox browser.

It’s a critical renewal for the Silicon Valley software maker, since its earlier deal with the search giant has been a major source of revenue to date.

The companies said the specific terms of the commercial agreement are not being released. But, in 2010, Google contributed 84 percent of Mozilla’s $123 million in revenue.

A previous version of the arrangement had expired at the end of November. Mozilla said at the time that it was in “active negotiations” with Google.

The relationship has not been without some tension of late. Since the first search royalty deal was signed in 2008, Google’s own Chrome browser has become a significant competitor. Just last month, Chrome overtook Firefox in global usage for the first time, according to StatCounter. Both browsers — software which is used to navigate the Internet — have about 25 percent market share.

Mozilla also has partnerships with other search providers, including Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon and eBay.

Here’s the full announcement Mozilla will soon put out:

Mozilla and Google Sign New Agreement for Default Search in Firefox

We’re pleased to announce that we have negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement with Google. This new agreement extends our long term search relationship with Google for at least three additional years.

“Under this multi-year agreement, Google Search will continue to be the default search provider for hundreds of millions of Firefox users around the world,” said Gary Kovacs, CEO, Mozilla.

“Mozilla has been a valuable partner to Google over the years and we look forward to continuing this great partnership in the years to come,” said Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President of Search, Google.

The specific terms of the commercial agreement are confidential and are not being released.

Earlier this month, the company released an Xbox Live app for the iPhone. On Monday, the company announced OneNote for the iPad and Lync for the iPhone. Today, Redmond announced iPhone versions of both Kinectimals and its SkyDrive online storage service.

That’s on top of an existing stable of apps that includes Bing, Photosynth and Windows Live Messenger.

While most of Microsoft’s iOS apps are free connections to existing services, the company is charging $2.99 for Kinectimals.

As I noted earlier this week, Microsoft has long faced the challenge of wanting to support its own mobile operating system, while also acknowledging that it is not the epicenter of the phone universe. The company still reserves some of its most extensive work for Windows Phone, which offers mobile versions of the full Office suite as well as a deeper Xbox Live connection than is possible on the iPhone.

Google has taken a similar approach, doing significant work for iOS alongside its Android efforts.

The free update will allow users to control the console using their voice and gestures, or even their Windows Phone (if they have one).

In addition, Microsoft will begin to add more than 40 content providers to the console to increase the catalog of live and streamed TV, movies and music.

Microsoft has announced nearly all of these details previously, including some of its content partners, so today’s announcement serves as a reminder now that the final product is ready to go.

Last week, I met up with Michael Suraci, Xbox’s director of marketing, to get a preview of the updates.

According to Suraci, Kinect, the motion sensor that launched last year, is a central part of the update. When it was introduced, it seemed that all it was good for was dance games, but clearly Microsoft had much bigger plans for the camera and the microphone.

Now users can speak naturally to the Xbox, which tears down a number of barriers to family members in the household that weren’t comfortable with the clunky controller. If Microsoft pulls it off, it could teach people that televisions are meant to be talked to, just as Apple has taught people that screens are meant to be touched.

An unknown subset of the nearly 60 million Xbox owners worldwide that have purchased Kinect will be able to use all the new features in the update.

But everyone will have access to many of the updates.

One major improvement is in navigation. For example, the old interface required the user to decide which category they wanted to go into. For example, games, video or music. Then, they had to choose the application, like Netflix, ESPN or Zune.

In the new user interface, the person can search across all of the categories and apps.

As Suraci demonstrates in the video, a user can say: “Xbox: Bing, ‘Fast and the Furious.’”

The results show all of the content that matches that criteria across games, music, video and other categories. The style of the user interface will be recognizable to anyone using a Windows Phone. The format will also be carried over to the upcoming Windows 8 update.

During Suraci’s demonstration, the software got confused a couple of times, but still, searching by voice will be much faster than typing in a string of words, letter-by-letter, using the controller to scroll through the alphabet.

Going forward, the Xbox could replace the need for a second set-top box in the household, but as Peter Kafka has mentioned before, it’s not a service for customers looking to cut the cord. In order to stream live TV, or watch movies, you’ll either have to pay for a subscription — like Verizon FiOS or Comcast’s Xfinity — or pay a la carte.

On Tuesday’s launch, the amount of content that will be available in the U.S. will be somewhat disappointing. But later in December and in early 2012, you will start to see integrations with Verizon FiOS, YouTube, HBO GO and Xfinity On Demand, TMZ, UFC, Wal-Mart’s Vudu service and others.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111204/heres-how-microsoft-is-adding-voice-control-and-gestures-to-the-xbox-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111128/ebay-adds-former-microsoft-employee-ken-moss-to-its-executive-team/ http://allthingsd.com/20111128/ebay-adds-former-microsoft-employee-ken-moss-to-its-executive-team/#comments Tue, 29 Nov 2011 01:54:36 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=147835 EBay has appointed Ken Moss to the position of VP of technology and science for the Marketplaces services team.

Moss will report to eBay’s CTO Mark Carges and be responsible for managing and developing the back-end buyer and seller experience on eBay’s marketplace, where items are auctioned off or sold new for full price.

Most recently, Moss co-founded CrowdEye, a start-up focused on search technology.

While CrowdEye’s Web site has been taken down, it’s expected that its co-founder (and Moss’s wife) Becca Moss will continue working on the technology, which was once being described as a Twitter search engine.

Prior to CrowdEye, Moss spent 20 years at Microsoft, where he started and led the Bing search technical team. He also worked on MyMSN, MSN Money and other parts of MSN.

Over the past year, eBay has been redesigning its site to simplify the user experience and to offer both items sold at auction or for full price. In the past few months, it has hired a number of new executives to fill several roles to complete the turnaround.

Moss will presumably assist with those goals in a more behind-the-scenes technology role.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111128/ebay-adds-former-microsoft-employee-ken-moss-to-its-executive-team/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111128/bieber-climbs-to-top-of-bings-annual-hit-parade/ http://allthingsd.com/20111128/bieber-climbs-to-top-of-bings-annual-hit-parade/#comments Mon, 28 Nov 2011 18:28:07 +0000 John Murrell http://allthingsd.com/?p=147713 It’s hard to top the public’s abiding (if baffling) interest in the activities of Kim Kardashian, but Justin Bieber did it, at least according to Bing’s almost-year-end roundup of top searches. Bieber dethroned the “reality” star as the most searched-for person in 2011 and didn’t even have to get married and divorced to do it. In the news category, searches related to the Casey Anthony trial topped those about the death of Osama bin Laden. More categories, rankings and info-nuggets are listed in a Bing blog post.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111128/bieber-climbs-to-top-of-bings-annual-hit-parade/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111122/microsoft-acquires-video-search-engine-videosurf/ http://allthingsd.com/20111122/microsoft-acquires-video-search-engine-videosurf/#comments Tue, 22 Nov 2011 15:42:58 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=146668 Another acquisition for Microsoft, this one quieter than most. The company has gobbled up VideoSurf, a video discovery company backed by the likes of former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, SurveyMonkey CEO David Goldberg and Israeli investment fund Pitango.

Price? A reported $70 million.

Details beyond that are slim, as the transaction hasn’t yet been announced, but Microsoft’s intentions here are pretty clear. It will likely use VideoSurf’s real-time visual recognition video search engine to enhance Bing and, perhaps, Xbox Live.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111122/microsoft-acquires-video-search-engine-videosurf/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111114/xbox-hoping-for-another-kinect-christmas-with-75-games-in-holiday-line-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20111114/xbox-hoping-for-another-kinect-christmas-with-75-games-in-holiday-line-up/#comments Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:00:56 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=143562 Microsoft’s hands-free gaming controller for the Xbox set a Guinness world record when it sold 10 million units during the 2010 holiday season.

A year later, Microsoft is hoping a large lineup of games — 75 in all – will fuel a repeat performance.

And, if more sports and dance games won’t work, then it’s also integrating the speech- and motion-controlled Kinect capabilities into all aspects of the Xbox to seal the deal.

“It’s not just something for videogames. It’s something that will have a fundamental change in how people interact with technology,” said David Dennis, group product manager of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business.

Dennis declined to provide an update on how many Kinect sensors the company has sold since last season. To be sure, it has a long way to go to a majority of owners having it.

More than 55 million of the latest Xboxes have been sold to date, compared to the 10 million sensors sold, based on last year’s sales figures.

But he said the 75 new Kinect games available for the Xbox coming out this holiday are four times the number of games that came out for the launch last year.

Sony’s PlayStation Move, which it says has sold eight million devices, expects to launch a third of the titles, or 26, between September and December this year.

Tony Key, SVP of Sales & Marketing at Ubisoft, says its company has a dozen games, especially made for the Kinect, coming out this holiday.

“We are big believers and we’ve had a lot of success on it. We are going to continue to invest in the space, and it’s a great way to broaden the market,” he said. “Motion-controlled this year will sell more than last year. Kinect has a bright future. We have more Kinect games and a higher forecast on Kinect games.”

The range of games has expanded vastly beyond the dance, fitness and sports genres that launched last year. However, in general, the games still tend to still be more family-friendly and casual and aren’t meant for the hardcore demographic.

“It was about breaking down the barriers and making it easier to play. The games we launched with fundamentally and absolutely exploited the magic of Kinect,” Dennis said.

But that’s slowly changing. For example, some of Ubisoft’s titles — such as Just Dance 3, Just Dance Kids 2 and Your Shape Fitness Evolved — follow the status quo, but the publisher is bringing Kinect aspects to all future Tom Clancy games, including Ghost Recon Future Soldier, which comes out early next year.

In the game, players use hand gestures to customize weapons and voice controls to choose different attachments.

Dennis said there are many more examples of games that have Kinect features that aren’t necessarily Kinect-only games.

For instance, in Forza Motorsport 4, a racing game, players can look to their left to see a competitor’s car out the driver’s side window. Electronic Art’s Mass Effect 3, coming out next year, will allow players during battle to use voice controls to talk to their squad mates, including something like, “take cover on the left!”

More broadly, Kinect is also being integrated into all aspects of entertainment on the Xbox, including the ability to use Bing to search the music, games and video catalog on Xbox Live, or control Netflix.

In Xbox’s latest Kinect commercial it illustrates how Kinect has everything to do with it being a replacement for a remote control, and never even shows anyone playing a game.

Here’s a video showing off Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon’s GunSmith feature:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111114/xbox-hoping-for-another-kinect-christmas-with-75-games-in-holiday-line-up/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111025/yahoogle-redux-why-project-porcupine-means-someones-definitely-going-to-lose-an-eye-this-time/ http://allthingsd.com/20111025/yahoogle-redux-why-project-porcupine-means-someones-definitely-going-to-lose-an-eye-this-time/#comments Tue, 25 Oct 2011 13:07:20 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=136354 Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

You gotta hand it to those geniuses over at the Googleplex, thinking up adorkable names for all their various plots and schemes.

And for its latest look-see of the Yahoo situation, it has revived an old one: “Project Porcupine,” presumably from the old joke about how you hug a porcupine.

Very carefully.

Or maybe you don’t hug it at all, which is why all the rumors about the search giant hooking up with some unnamed private equity firms have been so unclear and, well, hard to grab ahold of.

According to sources, there are three clear aspects of what is actually going on:

1. Interest in using Google’s vast cash hoard as part of an investment it would make in a deal — meaning the company was approached, which it is, often.

2. Desire of Google’s crafty Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora to perhaps find a clever way to get ahold of Yahoo’s display inventory to add to Google’s own fast-growing DoubleClick display advertising subsidiary — meaning Arora has been making the rounds at Yahoo to gauge interest.

3. Pure enjoyment in messing with Microsoft execs — who are now allied with Yahoo via its Bing search technology — as well as getting up any price the software giant would have to fork over to be part of any consortium that will be cobbled together in what is sure to be a hopelessly complex deal.

Whether incoming or outgoing or just an early version of Mischief Night, any one of these options — while interesting to contemplate — is certainly fraught for Google.

Remember the trouble three years ago when Google tried to do a simple search-advertising partnership with Yahoo, in order to pull it out of the clutches of Microsoft?

That effort ended with a resounding oh-no-you-don’t by the Justice Department, which promised an antitrust lawsuit was awaiting such a move to bring together the No. 1 and No. 2 search services.

And if it was a no-no then, any formal relationship or even arm’s-length investment in Yahoo by Google would inevitably be more closely scrutinized this time around.

In fact, what I wrote in 2008 applies a dozen times more emphatically today:

“It is bad for advertisers, it is bad for consumers, it is bad for innovation, no matter how well-intentioned Google is.”

Fast forward to today, after Google has already played a worrisome game of chicken with regulators over a number of acquisition deals — which makes trying to bring back Yahoogle akin to reaching for the third rail.

But that’s not what it’s going to do, in truth, because — even though Yahoo is still a tempting target — there is usually only one outcome to hugging a porcupine.

Ouch.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111025/yahoogle-redux-why-project-porcupine-means-someones-definitely-going-to-lose-an-eye-this-time/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111020/exclusive-msn-u-s-head-scott-moore-departs-portal/ http://allthingsd.com/20111020/exclusive-msn-u-s-head-scott-moore-departs-portal/#comments Thu, 20 Oct 2011 09:51:53 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=134734

Scott Moore, who runs the U.S. arm of Microsoft’s MSN portal, will depart the company, according to sources.

The well-known content exec is reportedly headed to another job, sources said.

Moore has worked at Microsoft twice in this career — first as publisher of its Slate online magazine. He came back to the software giant in early 2009, after a stint at Yahoo running its media operations.

At MSN, he was U.S. executive producer, responsible for leading the content and programming strategy for the service. Some of his most prominent initiatives were several innovative sites with Hollywood producers BermanBraun, as well as a rehaul of MSN in 2009.

What Microsoft does next with its portal business is a big question, of course, as it has aimed all its firepower — and gigantic piles of money — at its Bing search service. Thus, MSN, while one of the more highly trafficked sites on the Web, has often taken a back seat.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111020/exclusive-msn-u-s-head-scott-moore-departs-portal/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110926/priceline-hires-microsoft-exec-darren-huston-as-ceo-for-booking-com/ http://allthingsd.com/20110926/priceline-hires-microsoft-exec-darren-huston-as-ceo-for-booking-com/#comments Mon, 26 Sep 2011 20:57:19 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=124989 Microsoft executive Darren Huston is leaving his role as corporate VP of the company’s consumer and online organization for the position of CEO of Booking.com, a Priceline company that facilitates hotel reservations worldwide. Priceline announced previously that Booking.com’s CEO Kees Koolen will become chairman. At Microsoft, Huston was responsible for display and search advertising sales for Windows, Windows Phone, MSN, Windows Live, and Bing. Before Microsoft, Huston was an SVP at Starbucks and in charge of acquisitions and new product development.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110926/priceline-hires-microsoft-exec-darren-huston-as-ceo-for-booking-com/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110921/google-cries-bing-and-yelp-yelps-as-senate-hearings-commence-today/ http://allthingsd.com/20110921/google-cries-bing-and-yelp-yelps-as-senate-hearings-commence-today/#comments Wed, 21 Sep 2011 07:59:35 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=122853 Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Later today, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt will appear at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee for hearings on whether Google is a search bully or not.

Schmidt, according to written testimony obtained by the Politico blog, will be trotting out the company’s longtime argument that its competitors are “only one click away” from taking Google down.

And, in what can only be described as a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding furthering of that meme, Schmidt will apparently claim that Microsoft’s much tinier Bing search service could catch and pass Google by next year.

Reads the testimony, according to Politico: “Microsoft’s Bing launched in June 2009 and has grown so rapidly that some commentators have speculated that it could overtake Google as early as 2012.”

Say what? Say ridonkulous! The Facebook worry, I get, but costing-Microsoft-a-billion-a-quarter Bing?

That’s because in the most recent market-share report from comScore, Google had 64.8 percent of the total, with Yahoo at 16.3 percent and Bing at 14.7 percent. Even combining the pair — who are currently in a search partnership — they still have less than half the share that Google has.

In any case, although the Google-as-imminently-threatened concept displays a lot of gumption, it’ll be interesting watching Schmidt try to sell it.

And also to see Google’s critics call foul.

After Schmidt appears, there will be a second panel, featuring Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman; Jeffrey Katz, CEO of Nextag; and Tom Barnett, spokesman for FairSearch.org and counsel to Expedia.

Stoppelman, who almost sold his online reviews company to Google in late 2009, has since become a vocal detractor of the search giant’s methods.

In his testimony as well as exhibits, all posted below, Stoppelman paints a more dire picture of Google:

“When one company controls the market, it ultimately controls consumer choice. If competition really were just ‘one click away’ as Google suggests, why have they invested so heavily to be the default choice on web browsers and mobile phones? Clearly they are not taking any chances.”

Stay tuned for my liveblog at 11 am PT, as well as other AllThingsD coverage of the hearings.

9.21.11 Verbal Testimony _10am final_

9.21.11 Written Testimony _clean_

9.21.11 Exhibits

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110921/google-cries-bing-and-yelp-yelps-as-senate-hearings-commence-today/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110914/liveblogging-the-microsoft-financial-analsyt-meeting/ http://allthingsd.com/20110914/liveblogging-the-microsoft-financial-analsyt-meeting/#comments Wed, 14 Sep 2011 20:10:26 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=120828

AllThingsD’s Ina Fried and I are being held hostage by nefarious Microsoft PR chieftain Frank Shaw in a soul-sapping ballroom in Anaheim, Calif. — within spitting distance of Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World” ride.

The agony — especially since we are about to be entertained by a series of Microsoft execs, including CEO Steve Ballmer, at its annual Financial Analyst Meeting. Yes, it is that kind of day, which included the delightful middle seat on a Southwest Airlines flight.

Here we go:

1:11 pm: There may be forward-looking statements. Well, I should hope so.

1:12 pm: Investor relations dude Bill Koefoed is reading from letters from folks about the Windows 8 look-see, which is also going on here.

It would be touching, except it is not. But I like Bill, who probably has a thankless job, so we’ll let him knock himself out!

1:17 pm: Okay, Bill, let’s move on, although making the execs tiles a la Windows Phone is a nice touch.

1:18 pm: But, no, we go over the financial results from FY11. Double-digit revenue growth, margin expansion, tons of cash, consumers love Xbox and Kinect!

So why does the stock remain so flat? It’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in shareholders who don’t want to give Ballmer much of a break.

Actually, it’s because Wall Street is spanking Microsoft for its slowness in the smartphone and tablet space, that Google is offering Office for free and that Windows is taking a back seat to the browser. Also that cloud thing.

1:21 pm: Most of the slides, including the agenda, have been designed to look like Metro-style “live tiles.”

Note to Redmond: While the interface scales nicely from the phone to the tablet, you may be taking it a bit far.

1:23 pm: First up, COO Kevin Turner, whose speech is call “Operating Momentum.”

He comes out like a football coach and tries to make us all greet him back. I don’t want to go all Larry David here, but one of the unwritten rules of society is that you don’t make anyone under 12 years old or not in a cult do the crowd echo thing.

But, bygones! Turner talks about the strong businesses of Microsoft, especially its Business Division, which is 32 percent of FY11 revenue. The money-losing Online unit is a paltry four percent.

1:30 pm: Turner makes some comparison related to spending, like “drunken sailors.” Say what?

Moving on …

Now for some more football-coachy stuff like “Leveraging & Accelerating Our Strengths!”

Which would be Windows, for the most part.

Next bromide: “Our Cloud Leadership is a Strength!”

Says Turner: Microsoft is “all in!”

Actually, technically, it would be “all up!”

(I am channeling Larry David today. Very innnnnteresssting. Very innnnnnteresting.)

Back to Turner, who promises a “cloud that’s right for every customer.”

1:39 pm: Microsoft really does like the Metro look. It’s freaking everywhere.

1:42 pm: Now: “Embracing the Consumerization of IT!”

There are four pillars of that, including Windows 8.

And now a bit about the growth of the costly Bing and winning in the cloud against Google.

“With Office 365, ladies and gentlemen, we now have a product” to compete, notes Turner, rather gallantly.

Also, Microsoft is smacking back VMware in virtualization.

Go team!

1:46 pm: As an aside, should the consumerization of IT really have four pillars?

1:47 pm: Time for CFO Peter Klein, whose tile reads “Our Opportunity.”

Klein looks like an accountant, which is not an insult, with a reassuring, by-the-numbers tone. It is almost lulling, as Klein’s voice often is on the quarterly calls — which always end up putting my assistant Ed immediately into the nap zone, since I listen to the calls on a speaker phone in the office.

Klein begins by pointing out that the markets in which Microsoft compete will double by 2015, including in gaming and online advertising.

It begs the question: Will Microsoft get a big slug of that?

1:53 pm: Klein goes over the various markets to underscore Microsoft will.

The first up is phone, where the company is trying to break through with Windows Phone. It’s been late, but is a pretty good offering that could become stronger with its hook-up with Nokia.

Next: The big dog of Office. It’s still big, Google or no.

Then: Business Infrastructure — private clouds, public clouds, big clouds and small clouds.

Online advertising is next, which is a weak spot for Microsoft and where it continues to lose money. Which is why Klein spends 33 seconds on it, before moving to the gaming slide.

In that arena, Microsoft does shine, with Xbox and Kinect as very innovative offerings.

1:59 pm: Latest slide from Peter Klein talks about a “balanced approach to capital allocation” with three tiles below it — “invest for growth,” “return cash to shareholders” and “balance sheet a strategic asset.”

If the live tiles in the slide were indeed buttons on a smartphone, I think many in the crowd would be pushing the middle option.

2:01 pm: Peter Klein notes the company’s Triple-A bond rating. Take that, Uncle Sam!

2:02 pm: Klein hands things over to search and online services head Qi Lu.

2:03 pm: Lu, the head of Microsoft’s online unit, is one of the uber-geeks at the company and has perhaps its hardest task.

That would be competing with Google.

While the division loses boatloads of money annually in the effort, Bing has also been a very impressive offering and has been slowly gaining share.

Winning in the space is indeed, as Qi is saying, key to its future.

He brings up the Yahoo online advertising and search partnership, which has been a bit rocky for both parties.

“We had some struggles, because the undertaking is very complex,” said Qi, noting that things have gotten better. “I have confidence we will be able to unlock the economic opportunities.”

Let’s hope so, for the Online unit’s sake.

2:12 pm: Lu says that the company said that the company now has the needed horsepower to compete. But it still needs something new. “To win in search we must break through, break through from where we are,” he said. “We cannot try to out-Google Google.”

2:17 pm: We’re posting some of the key slides from Microsoft’s analyst meeting in this companion post.

2:20 pm: I’ll admit, I checked out a bit here, in which Qi outlines the basics of what Microsoft is trying to do to develop intelligence in online search.

I have heard this speech before from him and it’s a good conceptual model. Investors, of course, only care about financial results.

The message is about “solving deep human needs and delivering compelling experiences,” says Qi.

Disconnect: Wall Street only wants revenue and profits.

2:24 pm: Still, it is nice that Qi dreams so Bing, oops, big.

Next up, Servers & Tools head Satya Nadella, who used to work for Qi.

Nadella is a smoothie speaker and he quickly launches into his spiel about a strong but lesser known part of Microsoft with $17 billion in revenue.

2:35 pm: Nadella is talking about Microsoft’s SQL Server, one of those not-so-sexy big money parts of Redmond’s business. Among those using it are Visa, which built its micropayments using SQL. The next version of the database, btw, is code-named Denali.

On to Office 365 — the cloud-based version of Office. One business signs up every 25 seconds, Nadella says.

2:38 pm: Now he’s updating on Windows Azure, Microsoft’s OS in the cloud. It’s built with enterprises in mind, he says, pointing to some recent customer wins.

Budget carrier Easyjet, for example, has an internal app for their airport workers that runs on connected devices that then talk to Azure.

2:41 pm: The strategy is a mix of public and private clouds.

“In conclusion, our cloud strategy is to cloud optimize every business,” Nadella says, before giving way to Steve Ballmer.

2:46 pm: It’s either the longest or shortest FAM, jokes a golf-shirt-wearing Ballmer.

His tile: “Our Point of View.”

Ballmer has been here for the Windows 8 event and notes how well it seems to be going so far.

“We are seeing some positive reaction,” he says, posting some of the compliments from places like the “Twitter feeds.”

2:49 pm: Ballmer has an unusual way of speaking I always forget about, even though I have heard him talk eleventy-hundred times.

It is an up-and-down, sing-song style, in which he punches the heck out of some words.

Like: “World VIEW” and “Windows is AT the center.”

Which is Ballmer’s first point, because Windows is still Microsoft’s mainstay.

2:52 pm: He runs through the key themes — besides Windows — and they include: New hardware; natural interface, cloud, enterprise and consumer; and “1st party” applications, which means Office and such.

“These form some of the core elements,” says Ballmer, trying to knit it all together and make it not seem that Microsoft is the giant, confusing behemoth that many think it has become.

Ballmer is talking about getting the slowness of “mojo” in the business applications arena, but it could be said about its Windows Phone mobile strategies.

Which is next: “We haven’t sold quite as many,” said Ballmer, but notes “enthusiasm” for the platform.

2:57 pm: “I am not saying I love where we are, but I am very optimistic about where we can be,” he says. “We just have to kick this thing to the next level.”

Actually, about 12 levels. But who’s counting? (The Larry David of tech, that’s who!)

2:58 pm: Ballmer starts the every-word-LOUD about Office.

Why not? It is a huge business for Microsoft after all these years.

Ballmer calls Office “the biggest quiet opportunity.” I will admit it: I like it when a loud dude talks about quiet.

Now an Office demo of Lync, Microsoft’s unified communications offering.

3:07 pm: It is a cool demo, especially the translation part.

The Skype acquisition gets a mention too, with Ballmer noting in a modified Tony the Tiger: “It’s greeeeat.”

We’ll wait and see if Skype head Tony the Bates will deliver.

It’s soon onto Xbox and Kinect, which is decidedly great for Microsoft.

Ballmer notes there will be a lot more video and television offerings on Microsoft.

There is a demo that has some glitches, which is impressive anyway. Obviously, Microsoft is hoping Xbox becomes the home entertainment hub and discovery service (via Bing).

3:20 pm: Live TV is also a big deal, apparently, which is coming to the Xbox.

Finally, Ballmer sums it up, noting things are changing fast.

He says he gets it that investors worry if the company gets it.

“I am very optimistic about our future,” Ballmer concludes, punching NO words.

3:24 pm: It is now on to Q&A, which will also include Windows head Steven Sinofsky.

Goody, goody.

3:25 pm: First question is on whether Microsoft is bringing Office to the new-look Windows. That’s a big one.

Ballmer doesn’t firmly commit, but notes that Microsoft wants to support its platforms with applications.

“We are rethinking and working hard on what it would mean to do Office Metro-style,” Ballmer says.

3:27 pm: Second question on which apps will work on ARM-based Windows, another key question.

Sinofsky reiterates that Windows 7 machines will be able to run all apps in Windows 8 (but of course all Windows 7 machines are Intel or AMD-based, not ARM). Apps written for x86 won’t run on ARM, but all new-style apps will work on both.

Sinofsky notes that if all older apps were allowed to be ported to Windows-on-ARM, the ARM-based systems would lose some of their advantages when it comes to things like battery life.

3:30 pm: Next question is on the opportunity for Windows Phone in the enterprise, noting that most of the recent work on Windows Phone has been on the consumer side.

“The most important thing is to capture the imaginations of people,” he says, noting that they have both work and personal lives.

He notes Mango release has some improvements for businesses.

3:32 pm: Asked if the tablet market will enter the enterprise like the phone, Ballmer notes that consumers will buy lots of different devices and there is always the question of which machines the enterprises will allow in. Some tablets will come in that way, he said.

“We embrace that concept,” Ballmer says.

Sinofsky notes that the proposition of having a tablet that can turn into a serious work computer just by adding a keyboard will have significant appeal.

As for touch, he reiterates his contention that once people use a touch-based Windows 8 machine, they will soon start touching every PC they use.

3:38 pm: Analyst asking in a roundabout way whether Microsoft expects to do better than the 10 percent annual revenue rate it has had over the last five years.

CFO Peter Klein is not biting: “Our view is the opportunity is tremendous. It’s as great as it ever has been.” But market also competitive and fast-changing.

3:46 pm: Finally, a question about Yahoo and the firing of CEO Carol Bartz and all the other uncertainty there.

While Ballmer did the online search and ad partnership deal with her, this hot potato gets handed over to Qi Lu. Thanks, Steve!

The contract survives change of control, he says. “That does not really impact day to day,” says Qi about the Bartz ouster.

Then Ballmer decides to weigh in: “Hundreds of millions of people every day using those services. … No matter where they take their business …”

In other words: He has no idea!

3:49 pm: Next! What about bottom-line growth dropping over the next few quarters?

Klein said Microsoft is focused on the long term and it was not making a guidance statement.

Ballmer: “We’ll give you no guidance. None.”

Anyway, all the markets are growing! Did we not stress that?

3:52 pm: Well, what about a new pricing strategy?

No dice!

The Microsoft execs look a little weary and in need of some cocktail fare. Wait, that’s me.

More on upgrade from Windows 7 and how all these many devices from many companies will work fine together.

Ballmer notes that Bing and Skype will continue to support Google Android and Apple iOS.

It is a small world after all!

3:58 pm: Last question!

One on Office 365 and how it is doing.

COO Turner is back as the coach of Team Microsoft: Great, just great.

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