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Last month your blogger received an email from Brian Robson, a veteran webmaster, who runs the Non Smokers Movement Of Australia web site (among others), and has built up his sites by watching his log files carefully.
Brian often sends emails to your humble blogger and it seems he is quite fed up with the hype about this so called competition. Last month he wrote:
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Web Pro news (amongst others) keeps publishing pro-Bing articles. http://www.webpronews.com/us-search-market-google-down-bing-and-yahoo-up-2011-09 http://www.webpronews.com/google-bing-pagerank-2011-09 In order to sell magazines etc, Techo publications maintain the fiction there is a real competition happening. They have always done this - page after page of product reviews in PC Authority for example, it takes a while to figure out which is THE one. Which ISP, Intel vs AMD (I use AMD, but that's just me being Pepsi/Coke) This latest lot of stats is the pits, and most of the comments are not helpful either. The journo should know better. He's had years to figure out that users prefer google. This spin platform drives me crazy. I cannot reconcile any of this crud with what I measure. The company Experian Hitwise has a lot to answer for. Bing-powered indeed, what about Google-powered? Also as usual it's the US market! Europe hates Bing ... Full stop! Possible some of this is in-house. Or perhaps they limit their diagnosis to office hours? They do not disclose how they compile the figures. The drop in Google is 1% drop on 66% - I see that all the time. Lots of really annoying Add-Ins try to make Bing your search engine. Bing is tiresome. The default install for Windows is IE and Bing - it takes people a while to get this sorted - So perhaps sales or PC bargains in the USA create waves for Google. My stats show Google is used more at home, and more on the weekend compared with Bing. July has 21 weekdays and 10 weekend days, August has 23 weekdays, and 8 weekend days. Monday July 4th was Independence Day. Oh dear, is it really that simple? And what rubbish to say people are getting better at searching. Google is getting better at prompting them to be more precise, and people are using copy-and-paste big time to search for stuff - I now see it all the time with long bureaucratic-sounding phrases, spelled correctly. |
And dear reader, your humble blogger, while not necessarily endorsing these comments can hardly refrain from adding his own humble observations ... That there seems to be a similar pattern in the hype surrounding the competition between Windows Phone Seven and other smart phone platforms such as iOSX and Android.
It is now common knowledge that Nokia have at last started to ship the long awaited new WP7 phones. In the last few days your blogger has seen hundreds of online publications which positively effervesce with enthusiasm about the amazing specs of the new Lumia series. The extraordinary hardware specs! ... The camera, processor, AMOLED screen, memory etc. Some of them announce, with much fanfare, the world-shattering news that ... Hold the phone dear reader! ... And make sure you are sitting down! ... That Microsoft's new phone operating system Can actually do multi-tasking! ... (Gasp!).
Your blogger might be more convinced that there is genuine competition on the horiizon if these articles had raved about the performance of the amazing new multi-tasking Mango OS rather than the impressive Nokia hardware. Your blogger must humbly opine that he is not entirely surprised that a Microsoft mobile OS requires some seriously powerful hardware. As far as your blogger can ascertain, the average new Windows Desktop requires at least a Xeon Dual-core fan cooled processor with 2GB of RAM, and an extremely powerful separate video sub-system, in order to simply read some email! So it is hardly surprising that the Nokia WP7 phones are seriously beefed-up.
An article which overstates the features of the Mango OS can be found by James Thornton in the Softonic OnSoftware Blog, in which he asserts that:
With its Mango update, Windows Phone 7 became the first mobile platform to really get multitasking right!
The only justification for this remarkable assertion was that Windows Mango presents the user with a list of running tasks that has the appearance of a deck of cards!
It would be far more enlightening (and informative) to do a side by side comparison of the Lumia 800 and the N9 ... And it would be even more informative if Nokia beefed up the power of the N9 to match the muscle-bound Lumia 800.
Nevertheless if Microsoft actually have a mobile OS that can do multi-tasking, maybe there will be an opportunity to do some comparisons even if there isn't any serious competition.