Re: More of the same
Well the whole point of setting the default web search to Bing in a corporate setting where Office 365 Pro is in use is to ensure that search terms do remain “confidential” (at least, they remain within the agreed data bubble with the company and MS).
I think the article author was being purposefully anti-Bing, making reference to how it should be better, etc. In such a corporate setting where O365Pro is in use, it’s the perfect search engine because it can combine results for internal and external searches and keeps things confidential whilst doing so. Confidentiality is a good thing for a corporate user.
But also the author is skirting round an anti-trust issue; Google is the biggest search engine by usage statistics, and that is used by Google for competitive advantage in other areas. 48 State attorneys and the federal government are now interested in this aspect of Google’s business, and break up is possible. But break up of, say, search from, say, Docs is kinda nuts, simply because the ability to search internally and externally is lost. And if Google weren’t allowed to combine businesses so as to enable this, that probably means Microsoft wouldn’t be allowed to do so either. And then we have a problem.
The desired end result of such an anti trust action is increased competition. However, there can’t be competition if the consumer can’t pick and choose. Say I did want O365Pro but combined with Google search? Never mind the business and confidentiality barriers, just how technically could that work? Google would have to know an awful lot about how O365Pro worked server side for such a search to be sensible. And vice versa, if someone wanted Bing and Google Docs, etc.
The only way this can work for the consumer is if there are open standards for cloudy services, so that it becomes technologically possible to operate across clouds, not just within one single cloud. If anyone is working on such standards, well they’re not getting enough airtime.
Apart from the technology such standards would also have to account for competing data protection regulatory frameworks, as well as allowing for appropriate confidentiality. That likely ends up allowing for the superset of all laws globally. So things like GDPR probably become global rules.
Law makers have been remarkably lazy in addressing the walled gardens that the big companies have been allowed to create in the online age. It’s probably possible to do something about that, but it would have been a lot better had they insisted on open standards from the beginning...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
