I went to grab a coffee this afternoon at Blue Bottle in Oakland and the barista let me know a celeb was in the area - Mark Ruffalo. I have no real opinion about him as an actor. I think I've seen two movies he was in and thought he didn't add nor took away from my enjoyment of said movies. However, I'm always curious when movies or TV shows shoot in Oakland (Moneyball, Matrix Reloaded, etc) so I went to rusty-trusty Google and typed in "Mark Ruffalo Oakland". Nothing remotely relevant came up. Tried a few variations, adjusted some search parameters (only searches within 24 hours - one week) but still nothing that explains why Mark Ruffalo was in Oakland. I then popped over to Twitter and typed in the same keywords "Mark Ruffalo" and got these results:

As you can see, the 5th result down mentioned Mark Ruffalo and Sungevity, a solar startup down the street. Clicked on the link and BAM!, Mark Ruffalo sitting in a Tesla Roadster wearing a Sungevity hat. Looks like he was in the area not to shoot a movie but to pop into Sungevity for something or other.

Now these are just two specific instances and of course, I still do most of my general search on Google but it's been a long time since I last found the answer to a query outside of Google. It's a death by a thousand cuts for them as Facebook, Twitter, and others start chipping away at their defenses. Google looked unassailable, much like Microsoft 10-15 years ago. Today, there's only one product of Microsoft's that I use, Office. I've switched from Windows to Mac for my hardware, Windows Mobile to iPhone for my cell, and even Exchange to Google Apps for my businesses. The endless cycle of rise and fall in tech is unrelenting and no one is immune.

TechCrunch posted an article and the video below about a concept Google Tablet OS based on Chrome. My reaction? Eh...

 
What do Excite, Lycos, and Ask Jeeves have in common with the new Bing.com search engine? They all had flashy brand building commercials that tried to paint their search engines as more than just technology. They were supposed to be emotional, etherial, existential, plus any other "e" word you can think of. Remember Excite's "Have You Been Experienced" ads featuring Jimi Hendrix's song? Now what do Excite, Lyocs, and Ask Jeeves also have in common? As search engines, they're all garbage and except for Ask Jeeves, largely out of the search business (Ask Jeeves to follow shortly). How many television ads have you seen for Google? Maybe there's something to be said about concentrating your resources on building the best technology instead of hiring the best ad agency.
 
For those who don't know, Bing.com is Microsoft's newly launched search engine. I've tried it and it's not bad. It's not great, but it's far from the crappy search results that Live.com spit out. Plus they have some interesting features like the image search and video search. But Microsoft as of late seems to be all about the glitz and marketing as opposed to the real technology. With all the money at their disposal why not hire the best and the brightest engineers and have them build the best search engine possible? It makes me wonder whether all the money has made them complacent. It's always easier to throw money at an ad agency then to actually sit down and do the work.