Microsoft Office 2010 has been released for its first stage of testing, the new product includes a suit of web based tools, has Google rattled Microsoft’s gold plated cage?

Microsoft Office is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the Office software world, but there’s a new kid in town, a lightweight, fast punching, crowd pleasing challenger, Google Docs, who is currently running circles around Microsoft office in an online arena. Office needs to shape up and adapt to the changing needs of the consumer and Microsoft hope that Office 2010 is the product to maintain their market leading position.

Microsoft office has always been a paid-for software application, the move into an online environment will seem a little alien to Microsoft especially with Google Doc’s being free to use. As yet little information has been released about potential online pricing but it is hoped that Microsoft will offer the product for free. If we were to look at existing Microsoft charges online, we will see that a $3 per month charge will allow you to use the Desktop Workers suite of tools and a $15 per month charge will get you access to Exchange and Sharepoint services. With this in mind a potential charge could be extremely low or based on a small annual fee.

Google recently announced the removal of the Beta version of Google Docs and the up and coming launch of Google Docs for business, a new suite of online business tools. The removal of the Beta label will allow more business users to use the product and trust in a completed version of the software. Google Docs for business is a direct challenge to the up and coming Microsoft Office 2010 suite of tools and it is very evident that Microsoft is taking this challenge very seriously. Google want to recruit more business users but it is unclear as to whether the business version of Google Docs will be free-to-use or a charged for service. Google decision on pricing will be very influential and will set a market standard, but will Microsoft feel they need to compete or will they rely on the long established brand to add value to their product?

There are interesting times ahead and the competition between Microsoft and Google can only add value to both products, offering more assessable online tools which will definitely improve the user’s productivity and user experience.

Written by Creative SEO a UK Search Engine Optimisation Consultancy.

Hotmail has added some new Bing featured to its email interface allowing users to add content to outgoing emails. The feature is called “Quick Add” and allows you to include a variety of Bing content including images, videos, maps, restaurant reviews and movie times. The new feature is available to Hotmail users in Australia, Canada, China, India, US, and the UK.

The feature is simple to use, just start to compose a new email message, select the content you require from the quick add box which is on the right hand side, search the Bing search box and then insert your results directly into your email. “Bing!” it’s that simple, although can’t we do this already with cut and paste?



Actually it is a handy feature and it does speed up finding content to add to an email you’re composing but normally a user would have already found what they wanted to send to someone before writing an email. Not really sure how useful this feature is but it works great.

Article by Creative SEO News

Twitter has been identified as the next fighting ground for search engine supremacy, but has Bing jumped the gun and what does Google have up its sleeves?

Bing, Microsoft’s latest search engine, was launched last month to challenge Google and Yahoo in the search engine ratings war. It has to be said that Microsoft have done an excellent job, Bing offers its users a great service and it seems that although shrouded in a little controversy, Microsoft have improved their share of the marketplace.

Hot on the heels of their launch success, Microsoft is continuing to apply pressure to their competitors by being the first search engine to index “Real Time” Twitter Posts. Twitter posts offer an amazing source of real time opinion based information which will enrich and improve the relevance of a search engine’s results. But have Bing jumped the gun?
Bing is not indexing every Twitter post, only a selection of prominent celebrity Tweeters. Have Bing rushed the technology to market, offering only a partial solution?

Sean Suchter, general manager of Microsoft’s search technology centre, wrote on his blog: “Today we’re unveiling an initial foray into integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres.

“We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter’s public API to surface Tweets in people search.”

Prominent Tweeter like Ryan Seacrest, Al Gore and Guy Kawisaki are all indexed in the Bing search engine. Twitter results can be seen by using the keywords “Tweet”, “Twitter” or the @ symbol as part of a search query for the name of a twitter user. The results will include the user’s latest tweets (we have seen between 1 to 3 tweets being indexed so far per user) and a link to “see more tweets”. Currently this service is only working in the US version of Bing.
This all seems very impressive but Bing are not offering their users anything new, all of this information is available in Twitter itself and using Bing to search a partial database of twitter users will not offer users an accurate level of results. Search terms from within the Tweets are indexed within Bing, but a prolific Tweeter might Tweet 20+ times a day, which means that only a 1-3 of the users Tweets will appear indexed in Bing and only for short periods of time. We have not seen any evidence to contradict this.

Bing’s attempt to integrate Twitter content into its indexed search results seems to be more of a test than a usable new “Real Time” search facility. Let’s hope this was not a marketing and publicity exercise or just an attempt to beat Google. Bing needs to continue to develop this product, increase the number of indexed tweets and index the entire Twitter database in order to make this a viable addition to the search engine. It’s an exciting technology and it does seem a shame not to launch a fully working product.

Google have been reportedly in talks directly with Twitter and have shown a massive amount of interest in integrating Twitter directly into its search results. Not a lot of information has been released about Google’s current position which leads us to believe that something could be on the cards. We will just have to wait and see but let’s hope Google learn from Bing’s initial mistakes.

Article By Creative SEO UK