Thursday, October 15, 2009
AT&T, Google: Nuns on the Run
In the rhetorical battle over net neutrality, Google may have regulatory capitalism with which to bludgeon and batter AT&T, but AT&T has Benedictine nuns, an entire convent of them. In a 13-page letter to the Federal Communications Commission Wednesday, the carrier took issue with Google’s claim that its Google Voice service only blocks calls to adult sex chat lines, asserting that it also blocks calls to small businesses and Benedictine nuns.
It’s been a long time between weekend updates, and a long week without Peter Kafka, All Things D’s intrepid MediaMemo reporter. He returns Monday, and just in time, too, since John Paczkowski and Digital Daily will be out all next week. Must be August–do Europeans still take the whole month off? Or is that an urban legend? No matter; it definitely has not been sleepy around here. 
Microsoft’s recently unveiled search engine, Bing, has piqued Google’s interest, but the search sovereign isn’t losing any sleep over it–or it would like us all to think that, anyway. In an interview with Fox Business Network Tuesday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt dismissed Bing as the latest in a string of feeble search efforts at Microsoft.
Microsoft’s new search engine Bing unexpectedly went live this morning ahead of its scheduled June 3 launch date and it’s already done much to distinguish itself from Microsoft’s previous efforts in search. Certainly there’s far more verb potential in Bing than “Microsoft Live Search,” the service it’s replacing. And — beyond all this silliness about Bing’s prowess in adult entertainment queries — there’s a lot to impress.
The architects of Google search are holding court at company headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., this morning offering what promises to be a sort of state of the union on search. Overseeing the event, dubbed “Google Searchology”: Udi Manber, VP of Search Engineering, and Marissa Mayer VP of Search Products and User Experience. Key subjects: the challenge of solving every user problem, mobile search across multiple platforms and different UI schemes, and greater user customization through tools like SearchWiki and Google Search Options, a basket of new services just announced. 
Baidu’s shares have gained 72 percent this year, apparently for very good reason. The Chinese search engine is doing to Google what few others have managed to do: dominate it in search. Little wonder, then, that Baidu delivered another strong quarter this week.
Add another name to the list of Yahoo employees defecting to Microsoft. Dayne Sampson, Yahoo’s VP of Operations for Search and Advertising, has fled the company for its former suitor, Microsoft confirmed to Digital Daily.
As steady and reliable as a McDonalds hamburger, comScore’s monthly search metrics–and about as exciting. February’s search rankings were much like January’s, which were much like December’s, which were.… Well, you see where this is headed. Succinctly speaking, Google’s share of Internet searches in the U.S.: large. Everyone else’s: small.
What’s Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz’s latest thinking on a search deal with Microsoft? Your guess is as good as any because Bartz isn’t saying. Asked at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference yesterday whether she favors such a deal, Bartz said she prefers to discuss it in boardrooms, not auditoriums or the media. “I am not going to negotiate with my 55,000 favorite friends,” she quipped.
We’re not likely see a repeat performance of the surprisingly strong results Google reported in its fourth quarter when the search giant next reports earnings. Certainly, that’s the impression given by Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s grim economic commentary at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco Tuesday. 
Microsoft is still interested in a search deal with Yahoo, but for now it’s assuming one’s not in the cards. That’s the word from Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell, who, in remarks at a Goldman Sachs conference in San Francisco Thursday, said Yahoo is not a “silver bullet” solution for the problems with its search business.
