2 posts tagged “tech news”

True, true...

Microsoft makes most of its money from two products, Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. Nearly everything else it makes loses money, sometimes deliberately. Google makes most of its money from selling Internet ads next to search results. Nearly everything else it does loses money, too.

Neither company really cares because both make so much from their core products that it simply doesn’t matter. But companies, like people, strive and dream and in this case both dream, at least sometimes, of destroying the other. Only they can’t — or won’t — do it in the end, because it is against the interests of either company to do so.

The vast majority of Google searches are, of course, done on PCs running Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer. It is not in Google’s real interest to displace these products, which have facilitated so much of its success. Chrome products are given away, so they bring in no revenue for Google, and they don’t even provide a better search or advertising experience for their users, the company admits. So why does Google even bother?

To keep Microsoft on its toes.
...

This makes even more sense given the recent advent of Microsoft’s Bing search technology, which performs precisely the same competitive control function against Google. Bing hasn’t a hope of toppling Google as the premier search engine and Microsoft knows it. To date, Bing’s success has actually been at the expense of Google’s competitors, not Google itself.

Quelle: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/opinion/13cringely.html?_r=1

Looks like a team broke the 10% barrier...

http://www.netflixprize.com/leaderboard

(( More about the Netflix prize here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize ))

PS: The entrant "Just a guy in a garage" is still in the top 20...

At first, it seemed some geeked-out supercoder was going to make an easy million.

In October 2006, Netflix announced it would give a cool seven figures to whoever created a movie-recommending algorithm 10 percent better than its own. Within two weeks, the DVD rental company had received 169 submissions, including three that were slightly superior to Cinematch, Netflix's recommendation software. After a month, more than a thousand programs had been entered, and the top scorers were almost halfway to the goal.

...

"Just a guy in a garage" was the exception to all this openness. He didn't even have a link attached to his screen name, which kept creeping higher and higher on the leaderboard. By mid-January, there were just five teams, out of 25,000 entrants, ahead of him. And still, no one knew who he was or by what statistical magic he kept improving. "He's very mysterious," says Koren with unconcealed interest. "I hope you will at least be able to find out his name."

His name is Gavin Potter. He's a 48-year-old Englishman, a retired management consultant with an undergraduate degree in psychology and a master's in operations research. He has worked for Shell, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and IBM. In 2006, he left his job at IBM to explore the idea of starting a PhD in machine learning, a field in which he has no formal training. When he read about the Netflix Prize, he decided to give it a shot — what better way to find out just how serious about the topic he really was?

In 2001, Potter cowrote a book called Business in a Virtual World that described how companies could best take advantage of new technology. So he's well aware of the commercial value of improving recommender systems, which tend to perform poorly, sometimes comically so. (You liked The Squid and the Whale? Try this Jacques Cousteau documentary.) "The 20th century was about sorting out supply," Potter says. "The 21st is going to be about sorting out demand." The Internet makes everything available, but mere availability is meaningless if the products remain unknown to potential buyers.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-03/mf_netflix?currentPage=all