Microsoft reportedly mulls a does-everything 'super app' to expand mobile search Microsoft officials have reportedly batted about the idea of a smartphone "super app" that would combine a range of mobile consumer services to fuel advertising and drive users to products including Bing and Teams. It also would help Microsoft chip away at the dominant positions Google and Apple hold in the mobile search …
I didn't explain how to create a real artificial intelligence? I have repeated many times: the real artificial intelligence is obtained by lexical cloning of one person, with respect to his bias. Try, for instance, use (separately) the writings of Dickens, Shakespeare, Mark Twain or Barack Obama? Instead of incoherent texts from Internet? And you will get what you want: the genuine AI.
Look what happened when Openal, instead of producing the stupid model GPT-3, cloned real people with respect to their biases, and got lexical clones? What splash it produced? Even if these people, at the first glance, were not... the indeed great thinkers, of the caliber of Hegel or Einstein? Now imagine that all the texts of Poincare, Plato or Lenin are used? I tried it many years ago, I know.
There is no a single and abstract artificial intelligence. Each artificial intelligence replicates, reproduces a real person, who is its prototype. With all his character traits (bais) and knowledge. OpenAI demonstrates this.
For example, twenty years ago I reproduced Hillary Clinton and Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, with their writings and speeches; as OpenAI now reproduces unknown people. I also did the same (lexically cloned) with Alan Greenspan and President Bush, in 2002, a few years before PA Advisors vs Google. After PA Advisors I couldn't continue for 12 years, thanks to people from Google and FB.
Look, I'm not a Microsoft hater. I like Teams and Outlook, and I run Windows 11 voluntarily (quiet, you at the back). I also run Firefox and use DDG as my primary search engine, and I have a very low tolerance for advertising, especially advertising where it's not expected such as in my office productivity tools, which is why I run multi-layered ad-blocking. Just leave it alone, Microsoft . . . if people aren't using Bing, maybe the problem isn't that they don't know about it, maybe it's because Bing sucks.
One of DDGs main sources of information is Bing.
I would suggest that any search engine is better than Google, but may not return the same results as Google which may not be a bad thing.
I have never actually heard why people think Bing is a bad search engine, just too easy to slate it I guess. I wonder if Google will held similarly when people finally get board with it?
Advertising pays for all the free internet, the only other option is paywalls.
Life is sad, the end is nigh and Putin has the Nuclear option so enjoy what you do and don't worry the pain will be over soon.
Yeah, I've never actively used Bing so I've never been quite sure whether DDG acts the way it does just because it's directly relating Bing's responses to your query, or whether DDG is doing its own mangling before giving you the results, but I've never been able to use it as my daily driver.
Google have (for all their faults) pretty much nailed search, and despite the sometimes-aggressive insistence on returning "autocorrected" results even after clicking the "search instead for" link, you have several advanced search syntax options (though they're not comprehensively documented and seem to be removed or changed on a whim).
I could easily lose several minutes a day trying to use DDG as my primary, and as much as I'd like to support them and de-Google myself in equal measure it's just not worth the hassle. I do give it a go every few months to see if the situation's improved but I've been doing that for easily a decade now and nothing seems to have changed.
Last time I used bing, I was looking for drivers for a particular Dell laptop. I entered in the exact same information I would have entered into Google.
First 6 results were for shitty driver updater programs, then a page worth of Dell forum and knowledge base results, before finally giving me the result I needed, which was a link to the driver download page hosted by Dell.
In any case, there will be no crime online, as there will be no more anonymity. Social networks will change because now you will immediately find people close to you in spirit. Not bad in my opinion? Well, for me personally justice will prevail, those who robbed me will be punished and the largest fortunes will disappear like snow under the sun. Also not bad?
Hmm, let's look at the existing super-app example and see:
> food delivery to car and bike rentals to a Venmo-like digital wallet
Yup, all things that can currently be done with one app, the web browser. Anything else that could be included?
> calling and messaging app, which also includes censored news, online shopping, and games
Those also sound really familiar. More?
> drive users to products including Bing and Teams
Aha, now we see the flaw in your suggestion, Mr AC. No mere web browser can manage that! This "driving" is *clearly* the USP that end-users are clamouring for. Microsoft have pulled another world-beating idea out of the bag!
Come on, it's just the app equivalent of the "web portal" paradigm we had in the 90ies: A single go-to mall where the terminally clueless could find most things they might need in one convenient place.
Marketing is about not knowing anything about people, but still assuming you are smarter than the rest, so they now they try to marry the failed web portal paradigm with the (once) cool "app" paradigm, to create an integrated "web portal app". Yahoo!
How exciting, they've decided they want to be Google. Again. Give all the execs another $50 million bonus for this amazing plan.
Let us at least hope this "super app" is as crappy as most previous MS attempts to copy other people's ideas, so that this ultra vendor lock-in concept dies in the usual mess of unreliability, inconsistency and annoyance.
This is not about Google, but the abolition of the Internet as such! If Microsoft can find anything and everything without losing an iota of information, it means that Microsoft has created a database instead of the Internet. At the same time, there will be only one Microsoft search in the database, because this is Microsoft database. All other search engines are simply not needed in it. Consequently, Google remains out of work.
All information in this Microsoft database is ads and eventually it will charge for everything happens in it. Indeed, Microsoft already charges for the ads making.
Wow, what a crock that is! Wave the mouse near it and suddenly a load of your workspace is covered in this massive popover panel that captures clicks on it. And what's in it? Just a load of generica, that nobody really wants. Of course, whilst you can hide it, it's not really gone it's still snooping in the background.....
Western users are quite different from Chinese ones. Many didn't discover the Internet because of smartphones, and aren't dependent on a single app. Many still like to use plastic cards to pay, because they have bank accounts, and like something that is smaller, easy to carry around, and doesn't need to be charged each day to work. Also, they are accepted in many places where phones won't work (try to refuel your car here...). I can easily put my card on NFC-enable terminals (most of them) and type a PIN when needed - far easier than trying to get a 6" (or larger) phone out of my pocket or bag, unlock it, etc. etc.
Moreover, what app does MS have people can't live without? Outlook? Maybe Facebook is in a better place to deliver that - still even most Whatsapp users aren't so locked-in - they can easily switch to their bank app to perform bank-related tasks. There is also more competition among banks than there is in China, probably.
This is mostly wishful thinking - they see the huge success of some entities in a a totally different society and market and believe they can easily repeat it in a totally different situation. It won't work, simply.
> because Windows users just looooove MS ads
Sure they do, why else would they use Windows, Office and the whole shebang?
MS marketing knows people yearn for fresh new experiences (don't clench your buttocks!) and to be helped spending all that useless money their employers insist on piling on them. You know they do, it's been clearly the two mainstays of their strategy for decades now.
x.com registered in 1999; wechat available from 2011; MS still playing catch up.
Clearly Musk should be given all the credit[1] for any and all "super apps", we need to make sure he is given his due. Maybe we ought to encourage him to sue Tencent?
[1] oops, typo - for "credit" read "blame"; sorry 'bout that.
By the way, not only Google and Fb will suffer from the fact that Microsoft established firmly its database, taking what was left of the Internet. Almost all IT companies, let me say 98%, will soon go out of business, as they will not be able to catch up with Microsoft, which has began its spur 5-6 years ago. "Hee-hee," I gloat.
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