How the mighty have fallen. Jerry Seinfeld’s Microsoft ads have been the subject of much speculation and now we can all see what the fuss is about:

Terribly unfunny. Here’s how it should be done Jerry:

After reading that Microsoft wanted to buy Powerset for $100m I decided to have a go on the now legendary new search engine. I wasn’t amazingly, amazingly amazed with the outcome. Google and Powerset came up with broadly the same answers and in one case Google had on its first page what I had in mind when I typed the query. In both cases the search string was identical and parsed in the natural language in which Powerset supposedly has the advantage.

I don’t think it is a bad buy by Microsoft, if nothing else it may help persuade Silicon Valley types that MS is a cool place to work. This is so long as MS doesn’t suffocate Powerset under its bureaucracy after the purchase goes through. This is what Yahoo did to delicious, and it is painful to see such a good idea still sitting on the launch pad. I’ve said many times before delicious is the best bet for anyone to come up with a better text search engine than Google. It has the potential for personalised search in a way Google never will but only Digg seems to do anything about it. Maybe PARC will come along and rescue delicious but since they have no record of acquisitions and came up with Powerset in the first place then I doubt it.

Voice, not text

I think natural language search does have a bright future but not as a text search engine. I was watching one of Bill Gates’ many valedictory interviews and one thing he said that caught my attention is that MS hasn’t yet given up on voice interaction with computer. This brings to mind the scene in Star Trek IV when Scottie says ‘hello computer’ into the mouse but it is intriguing. Text search engines are actually better without natural language search as it is less arduous to type in keywords. However natural language search comes into its own with voice. At the moment Powerset requires you to type the query in but it seems to me that this is not what MS has in mind for it.

I think that MS is looking beyond text search altogether. Gates has already posited his view of the future in which people interact with computers in new ways. Now I know he has left MS full time, but he’s still spending one day per week there. It wouldn’t surprise me if linking Powerset to the voice technology he is excited about is what BillG is spending his 20% time on. If he is then watch out Google.

Read more:
On Joshua Schachter
On Yahoo
On Bill Gates

The retirement of Bill Gates reminds me of the end of the Lord of the Rings, it seems to have happened about eight times. I remember him announcing stepping down as CEO, stepping down as CEO, stepping down as Chief Software Architect, announcing his retirement, doing his last CES, doing his final developers keynote, doing his wacky retirement video, announcing his retirement date and now, finally it seems, actually leaving (except he’s still doing one day per week at Microsoft). Like many Microsoft products, it seems there are several versions of the Gates’ retirement. Even in reporting it I have caught the disease and described it twice.

Gates is the standard by which all other technology entrepreneurs will be measured. No doubt there were better coders than him but there is no better strategist. Even though Apple saw the potential of Xerox PARC’s Graphical User Interface first it was Gates who recognised hardware didn’t matter and staked his entire company on that insight. And won.

Even his fiercest critics acknowledge the debt owed to MS. By creating a common OS platform for other developers to build on MS made the personal computer accessible and help laid the foundation for the explosion of the Internet. Yes MS engaged in some rather fruity behaviour down the years but even now, with their power on the wane, we must admit we are better off with them than without.

These days those insights are as sharp as ever. It was Gates who put in train the company’s greatest innovation – the Xbox – and with it the one genuinely distinctive product, Xbox live. In 2003 he predicted the computerless home in an article which I have not seen bettered for its brevity and insight. And now instead of wasting his money on yachts he is giving it away to promote education and combat disease. If he does to malaria what he did to Netscape the world will be a better place.

Choose Our Cause

I am a startup founder and the Chairman of a small charity HiCEP (hicep.org.uk). HiCEP was started by my Dad to provide education for the children of his home town of Belet Weyn, Somalia. When he died in 2008 I wanted to do something to help small causes like HiCEP raise funds. I was working on another startup but I quit it and moved on to Choose Our Cause.

The idea came to me when I was looking for my friends’ film recommendations on facebook. I ended up buying a DVD recommended by one of my friends on his profile and I thought that would be a very powerful way to advertise – triggered by a friend’s recommendation. I thought we could build a facebook application which made friend’s recommendations easy to browse and when we have enough users, start to run small contextual ads related to what people recommended. It’s called Choose Out Cause because we will split the revenue from the ads with our users who can donate it to a cause they support.

We have just started and we need to get as many users as possible to start attracting advertisers and revenue for our causes. Take a look at our app and if you like the idea, tell your friends:

http://apps.facebook.com/chooseourcause/

Robleh Ali

Co-founder, Choose Our Cause

Read more:

High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner’s Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars

On Microsoft’s biggest mistake

On Microsoft strategy

On XP