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First off, let’s get this out of the way:
Bullshot: adj. | The overly optimistic description of a commercial product by the company bringing it to market.
The phrase was of course brought to prominence by the incorrigible Tycho, of Penny-Arcade fame. It fits much of the lip-flapping done by technology and new media companies, especially in the case I highlight here.
Microsoft Says Better Than Google In Six Months
So Microsoft came out and announced that they’ll be releasing a new search engine by September. In their words precisely, they will be “more relevant in the U.S. market place than Google”. Microsoft, you’ve gone 5 years without releasing a meaningful upgrade to your flagship operating system, and many of your other offerings such as Windows Media Player have languished just as much. None the less, you believe that simply coming out and announcing that you’re going to integrate your search tool into messenger and hotmail that it will instantly be successful. If the lukewarm reception of Google’s recent addition of googletalk to their gmail service is any indicator, you may want to consider an alternative method for hyping your product.
Who knows, maybe they’ll succeed this time around. I still hold the Xbox and Xbox 360 as evidence that there’s a bit of promise left in Redmond, so maybe I’ll be surprised. What do you think? Bullshot, or Bull… uh, Bulltruth?
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MS is finally realizing that sometimes the world doesn’t listen to them. That Apple kicked their ass on music and video. That Google killed everyone on search. They wasted a ton of time and money trying to jump on something the world was not ready for: the digitally-controlled house. While they wasted time on that, Apple, Yahoo, Google, Linux, Firefox et al were taking control of areas that the world was interested in: music, video, search, photography, file sharing, better browsing, security, virus protection, etc.
Remember MS’s ridiculous claim two years ago that, “the browser is dead”? Firefox jumps in and IE continues to get destroyed by hacks and holes. Bad press continues to hammer MS and drop their sales and suddenly MS realizes that maybe, just maybe, that Web Standards thing isn’t just a passing fad. Corporations publicly announce switching to Linux, citing security holes in IE as the reason and suddenly the browser is back from the grave (well, in beta, anyway).
MS fell asleep at the wheel. Fully awake now, like Rip Van Winkle, they realized the world grew up and they missed it.
I don’t buy it. If they think they’re going to be so good in 6 months, where do they think Google would be in another 6 months?
“MS fell asleep at the wheel.” I completely agree with that. And how they are trying to play catch up and Bill Gates is opening his mouth a little bit too much………just like he did with talking about the release of Halo 3 at the same time as the PS3