It's a Bing thing: Microsoft drops plans to shove unloved search engine down throats of unsuspecting enterprises Microsoft has U-turned on plans to automatically switch browser search defaults to Bing when users install Office 365 Pro Plus. In January, Microsoft let slip its plans to install a browser extension for Chrome that makes Bing the default search engine when users installed or updated Office Pro Plus, a key part of enterprise …
This might be controversial, but is that necessarily a bad thing?
If a company is fully bought into the Office 365 services already then all the information is already being indexed - and that's happening because of a policy / choice by the company to use the these services rather than a case of inappropriate data hording. It's effectively sanctioned and expected behaviour.
Bing is, in this case, just one of the search channels an end user could use.
I wasn't suggesting that overwriting a user selected search engine choice was a good thing, I was suggesting that integrating web search with results from internal business data stored in Office 365
might not necessarily be a bad thing. I'm sorry that you don't necessarily understand threaded conversations.
Oh yeah the Nokia handset business :S
Although they can't be accused of tampering it since there was like 4 apps for the environment (Still in my opinion best handset for just Outlook email, not anything else), did any search engine provider bother making extensions for their search engines?
Always a sign that what you're doing is perfectly above board and not at all a stab in the back, no siree.
Step by step, little by little, even Microsoft learns that the Customer Is Always Right. Who knows ? Maybe another thousand years and we'll get there.
Are we to somehow think that a specific search term that we are willing to put into a web search box is somehow less confidential than the words we put in a business email only to have it checked for grammar and spelling? But hey, at least the most recent update gives me suggestions on how to use the corrected version of my pourly spelt wurds.
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...
> 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).
One of the original complaints, though was that this claim simply does not hold up to scrutiny.
What you're actually potentially doing here, is training employees that it's OK to type confidential/sensitive information into the omnibox.
Which is all well and good when the search goes to MS (the agreed provider). It's not so good if the user is in a browser who's search engine hasn't been changed (or has changed back). That might simply be because they're working from home today, or might be because they got fed up of Bing serving them porn and changed it back to Google.
So, you may actually be increasing the risk of information being exposed, not reducing it.
Putting the words "Office365" and "confidential" in the same sentence is being somewhat optimistic, I feel. "Just me and people I choose to share with" is confidential. "Just me, Microsoft, Microsoft's partners, NSA, GCHQ, and a long list of law enforcement bodies" is not. And I doubt the latter list is anywhere near complete.
Sleight of hand seems to be the default Microsoft mode of operation.
And they don't seem to learn that the users will latch on to their rigged games.
It seems so often with sleazy behaviour - not just Microsoft- that the suits seem to think no one will notice. The Post Office getting people locked up to try and hide their software failure a big case in point.
to do this properly you need a shill who makes it SO tempting to jump in and start choosing the card FOR him that you get suckered in...
But yeah - MS changes your default search FOR you, because they *FEEL* "it is better" [pejorative use of the word 'feel'] , and the shill comes along and THANKS Micro-shaft for having done so, glowingly reviewing how much BETTER things are, now...
For the company user of O365Pro, having Bing as the default probably Is better because it stops confidential search terms being carelessly typed into the wrong search engine.
Technical merits of the search engine (speed, accuracy) are likely insignificant in the deliberations.
Whilst technical whizzes such as yourself would never ever get confused as to what search can see what data, I reckon that 95% of corporate IT bods would figure that at least 50% of their users aren’t capable of attaining such dizzying heights of dependability and online awareness.
Oh and Google are engaged in exactly the same game, but because they did it first and the other way round, no one has noticed.
"Bing is a search engine which enlightened persons increasingly use and often get more relevant results than the ad infested Google."
This is totally correct. But you will get down-votes it's just de rigueur here on the reg to say most things that are pro MS. You'll be accused of being a shill... People simply won't try Bing because.. just because... I've never been given any good reason.
"I've tried Big several times and the results just are not a relevant as Google; sorry but if what I'm looking for is on page four in Bing but page one in Google, guess which I'll use."
It's odd but I tend to find the opposite of that. Makes you wonder why. I wonder if, for example, two people searching for the same thing can get different results.
I stopped using Google Search a while ago.
I don't use Bing directly, but use Ecosia which uses Bing as the underlying SE.
I've not had any issues with it really. I tried Bing when they first launched and found it more or less unusable, but it does seem to have come a long way.
too many people don't get this reference... I particularly like the mental image of Bing (the search engine) with Bing (cbeebies character) personality - small, whiney, crys if it doesn't get its own way and is never told NO!
User: "OK windows, change default search to sometng useable"
Bing: "oh why won't you use me to search? Floooopppp...."
End of episode voice over "Being the semi compulsory search engine... it's a Bing thing!"
> What is "Bing"?
Bing used to be a manufacturer of a fizzy drink available in East Kent (at least) in the latter half of the last century, notable for the swing metal, ceramic and rubber stopper used to close the bottle, if not for its taste.
What a pity that they (probably) didn't trade-mark the name, which would have prevented MS from using it for a search engine...
"Bing used to be a manufacturer of a fizzy drink available in East Kent (at least) in the latter half of the last century, notable for the swing metal, ceramic and rubber stopper used to close the bottle, if not for its taste."
I'm tempted to down vote you as you clearly did not use the proper UK English for fizzy drink: "Pop"
You are missing:
Support for high resolution displays
In Outlook
- support for oauth authentication. You will need this for gmail accounts from mid-this year.
- hotmail moved from deltasync to activesync at some point, I'm not sure when it was, and you might have problems with that
In Excel
- there's some new functions that are quite useful, eg switch() sumifs() and countifs(). You can do everythying they do with older functions, but they do reduce the number of nested functions in some cases which makes it easier to debug.
"The changes are such that delivery of the search extension is being delayed for an unspecified time."
Shouldn't that read "Microshaft said 'The changes are such that delivery of the search extension is being delayed until we think everyone will have forgotten'..."?
I'm surprised nobody else seems to have mentioned this as it is the most obvious thing I got from the article.
If I search a word/phrase on any web search engine I would expect to get public-facing results. Not my personal or business files. Nor would I ever want it too
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