Via:Mashable

At LeWeb yesterday, Microsoft demonstrated a pretty, new way to curate the web’s information: Montage.

Montage looks and feels a lot like a glossy magazine web or tablet app. It works by allowing the user to pick a keyword or two; the application then pulls data and content from a variety of media-rich and real-time sources, including YouTube, RSS feeds, Twitter and Bing News. The content is then arranged on the page in a grid format — you get to choose the exact layout — for your own consumption and for sharing with others. 

For example, we used the term “christmas trees” to create a Montage of our own. We picked a fairly standard web-magazine format, then we were able to customize each “widget” or compartment of the layout with a WYSIWYG editor. We added images, a Twitter term trend chart, news articles and more.

When the editing part was done, we were able to tag our visual scrapbook, share it with our Facebook and Twitter networks and then publish it to a unique web page.

Here’s a demo of Montage’s basic features:

In light of our collective focus on web apps and tablet form factors lately, Montage strikes the right note at the right time.

However, we should note that (surprise, surprise) the app didn’t always play nicely with our recently acquired Chromebook and the Chrome web browser. And your visual scrapbook will only be as awesome as Montage’s sometimes-flawed understanding of your keywords.

Montage comes from Fuse Labs, a research-focused division of Microsoft that concentrates on social, real-time and rich-media experiences. Another cool Fuse project we liked a lot was Kodu, an experimental, visual game-programming platform designed with kids in mind.

I tried it out myself, you can check out my Montage's below and tell me what you think in the comments.

Sneaker Culture

Nba

To challenge Google, Bing’s marketing chief, Eric Hadley, has a $100 million annual budget and gets to hang out with Jay-Z for work. Peter Lauria reports on Bill Gates’ opposite.

On a typically gorgeous late-October evening, about 300 tastemakers assembled at the trendy Delano Hotel in Miami’s South Beach. As Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Venus Williams, Miami Dolphins wide receiver Brandon Marshall, and other celebrities looked on, Microsoft executive Eric Hadley stepped up to a microphone to address the crowd. Not one for attention, the megawatt star power caused Hadley’s voice to crack nervously as he started to speak, according to a source in attendance that night. Pulling himself together, Hadley led the crowd over to the Delano’s world-famous skinny pool and directed the underwater lights to come up for the big reveal: There, printed on the pool’s floor, were the lyrics to Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin,’” marking the official launch of a marketing campaign put together by Hadley and the rapper’s handlers to promote his autobiography, Decoded, through Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

Chances are you’ve never heard of Eric Hadley. But you’ve probably heard of Bing, which has achieved a remarkably high degree of awareness for a brand just two years old. And that is largely owed to Hadley’s work. Hadley’s official title is general manager in charge of worldwide marketing for Bing. A better way to think of him, however, is as Microsoft’s Mr. Hip. Hadley’s the guy making Bing, if not all of Microsoft, cool.

“He’s the one responsible for getting tastemakers to look at Bing differently,” says Steve Stoute, the branding expert of the hip-hop community who first introduced Jay-Z and Hadley roughly seven years ago. “Microsoft is a big ship to turn, but Hadley’s a guy who pays attention to what’s happening in subcultures and knows how to incorporate those ideas and values into the brand concept for Bing.”

Hadley, 39, cuts quite a different figure than the one the public has of a Microsoft executive. He lacks the nerdy glasses and bowl haircut of founder Bill Gates, the aggressiveness of CEO Steve Ballmer, the technological savvy of chief software officer Ray Ozzie, or the polish of any number of other executives inside the company. With his crew-cut close, receding blond hair and stoic face, he looks like a cross between Daniel Craig and Vladimir Putin. Hadley has the casual-chic fashion look down and is as comfortable at 1Oak as he is in the boardroom.

And while Hadley spends his fair share of time toiling over a keyboard analyzing spreadsheets and giving PowerPoint presentations in power suits, there’s no doubt that his is the most fun job within all of Microsoft. After all, going to events like the Victoria’s Secret fashion show, NBA All-Star weekend, and the Sundance Film Festival is a primary part of his job description.

“At the end of the day, EVERYTHING I do has to drive the business goals,” Hadley wrote in a followup email, emphasis his.

Jay-Z and Eric Hadley attend the DECODED Search Experience launch party in Miami on Oct. 20, 2010.

“The other guy is a technology play,” Hadley says, referring to Google not by name as all Microsofties do. “We want to be a consumer brand and make Bing relevant to people’s everyday lives, and the way to do that is to connect through pop culture.”

Armed with a reported $100 million marketing budget, Hadley has struck deals to sponsor the “Two Kings Dinner” hosted by Jay-Z and LeBron James during NBA’s All-Star weekend, have Bing integrated into NBC shows The Philanthropist (since canceled) and Parenthood, and staged the first live event on Web video site Hulu in conjunction with talent agency CAA. Called the Bing-a-thon, the 81-minute show still ranks as the most viewed live event in Hulu’s history, ahead of any concerts and even President Obama’s inauguration.

Hadley’s also inked partnerships with Victoria’s Secret, Ryan Seacrest, and boutique hotel chain and club SoHo House. Seeing a rare opportunity to brand a film a la You’ve Got Mail, Hadley even produced a documentary about world-renowned cardiologist Dr. Richard Bing, though he has no affiliation with the search engine. (No vanity project, the film was accepted into Sundance.)

Tucked neatly behind the more headline-grabbing deals, Hadley has struck several savvy localized partnerships that smartly showcase Bing to an audience that might otherwise default to Google. He made walking billboards out of Manhattan dogwalkers from Big Paws, Little Claws by dressing them in Bing T-shirts and created promotional programming for New York City taxis with local personalities.

“He brings Hollywood and New York back to Seattle,” says Demand Media’s Joanne Bradford, who worked with Hadley at Microsoft and hired him when she was with Yahoo, “and that’s helping make Bing more culturally relevant.”

Statistics bear that out. Bing registered 21.4 million new search users its first year out of the gate and has inched up steadily since then. Last month, users conducted 1.92 billion searches on Bing for 11.5 percent of the market, growth of 7 percent and 0.3 percent, more than any other search engine, respectively, according to comScore. Google still owns the marketplace, of course, with a 66.3 percent share and 11 billion searches.

Microsoft knows that it can’t seriously challenge Google’s dominance, so its strategy is to capture the influencers instead. If Bing could grow its market share to, say, 20 percent, it would be a major psychological if not financial milestone for a software giant that has continually been out-innovated by Google, Apple, and others in the last two decades. That means there are a lot of eyes—and a concurrent amount of pressure—on Hadley. So far, he’s killing it.

“The work he’s doing has delivered results, therefore he’s attracting attention at Microsoft,” says Jae Goodman, chief creative officer of CAA Marketing, a division of talent agency CAA, who first met Hadley through his wife while in college in the early ‘90s.

It’s easy to dismiss Hadley as a party boy burning through Microsoft’s money. To be sure, sources universally agree that he knows how to have a good time. But, to use the words of Ben Silverman that were echoed in sentiment if not vernacular by many of Hadley’s other associates that spoke to me for this piece: “That guy works his ass off. If he’s out until 2 a.m. it is because he is working, and he’ll still be the first one at the 8 a.m. meeting.”

If he’s in Seattle for the meeting, that is. Though Hadley grew up and lives in Seattle, he spends a week each in New York and Los Angeles per month, as he puts it, “meeting with people and going to events.”

Hadley is sheepish about the more glamorous aspects of his job, saying he “spends a small percent of time socializing, most of the time I’m at headquarters sifting through data.”

“At the end of the day, EVERYTHING I do has to drive the business goals,” Hadley wrote in a follow up email, emphasis his.

Hadley noted, for instance, that the Jay-Z deal was driven by research showing that the demographic groups who are his biggest fans—Gen Y (18-24 year olds) and African Americans—are more active online searchers than other groups. Going deeper, he trotted out data showing the 18-24-year-olds consume 61 percent more search pages online than average and African-American users view 29 percent more search pages. Moreover, affluent African Americans are more likely to use Bing over Google, one of the few demographic groups to do so, and those who listen to hip-hop weekly consume 19 percent more search pages monthly than others.

But Hadley hardly has to prove his marketing chops. Indeed, he doesn’t get nearly enough credit for them. Hadley came up on the agency side of business, most notably at Ogilvy & Mather, before jumping to Microsoft at the suggestion of CAA’s Goodman. He left Microsoft for a short-lived post at now-defunct online video site Heavy.com, worked under Bradford for a time at Yahoo, and then returned to Microsoft to run the Bing campaign.

“Eric was a pioneer in driving adoption of research methods to prove the effectiveness of online advertising,” says Bradford, who worked with Hadley on a landmark report on the topic for the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Microsoft is the kind of company that doesn’t mind spending money as long it makes some, too. According to Silicon Alley Insider, Microsoft spends $667 million for every point Bing gains in market share. Though Microsoft executives insist that Bing will be profitable, SAI boss Henry Blodget estimates it would need for market share to climb to at least 30 percent for it to book profits large enough to be meaningful to the company’s overall business. (For a more complete analysis of Bing’s value proposition, see Blodget’s post.)

“Microsoft has a lot of trust in Eric, otherwise they wouldn’t have brought him back,” Bradford says. “But they didn’t just give him a ton of money and say ‘Go party.’ Everything has to be backed up with numbers. He’s in the boardroom pitching why getting Bing into fashion, entertainment, culture is good from a return-on-investment perspective.”

For Hadley, however, it’s a lot simpler. For all his new-media cool, at bottom Hadley is an old-school relationship executive. He builds trust over time, prefers to do business in person, and excels at seeing the unifying thread that networks people and industries together.

Or, as LeBron James’ manager, Maverick Carter, put it, “For me, it’s less about Microsoft and more about my relationship with Eric. He’s the guy out there beating the street.”

Jay-Z is teaming up with Microsoft's Bing search engine to promote his upcoming book, "DECODED."

 Jay-Z fans will be able to access pages from the rapper’s upcoming book — Decoded, an exploration of his life and lyrics — starting this week for a whole month before it hits store shelves on November 16. This sneak peek is part of an online interactive game and campaign that has been formed in collaboration with Bing.

Here’s how it works: Pages from the book will be physically placed around the world with a majority in the New York area, in locations related to specific content featured on Bing — specifically Bing Maps and Bing Entertainment. Five to 10 new pages from the book will be revealed each day, and participating fans who visit Bing.com/Jay-Z will be able to find these pages either online or in person.

“Pages will be placed in locations related to the content, so that’s everything from high profile advertising like billboards to very very unique placements such as swimming pools and pool tables, and even high-fashion designer clothing racks,” says Lisa Gurry, a Bing spokeswoman and communications director.

Once players locate a page, they will get credit for it online. If they find it in a physical location, they will be able to text a unique game code from the page. Players will be entered into drawings to win a signed copy of the page they’ve located. And everyone who locates a page will be entered into a contest for the grand prize — two tickets to see Jay-Z and Coldplay in concert at Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve.

The interactive game is heavily built on Microsoft technology, and it includes Bing Maps features such as Birds-Eye View and Streetside imagery. It also has a variety of Bing Entertainment features — in this instance, photos and videos of Jay-Z, as well as song clips.

The campaign, which was developed by creative agency Droga5, is the first of its kind for Bing. Gurry says it was conceived as a way to raise buzz about Jay-Z’s book, while also potentially introducing Bing to a new audience. Gurry says Bing has previously worked with various artists in many aspects of the entertainment industry, and that it will probably continue focusing on that area.

“As far as replicating this specific campaign, we’ll see how it goes and take it from there,” she says.

It may be the behemoth of the personal computing industry, but Microsoft has as many quirks and oddities as any basement-dwelling startup. Online MBA Programs has rounded up a few of those tidbits, plus some more facts about the company that you may have never heard. To start off, did you know that Microsoft didn't make MS-DOS, its original blockbuster OS?

[Via: Online MBA Programs]

Microsoft Research and NASA have teamed up once again and brought the “most complete, highest-resolution coverage of Mars available” to WorldWide Telescope. Microsoft’s app lets you explore space either through a zoom-and-pan interface or guided tours.

This imagery is the handiwork of a group informally called the Mapmakers, led by NASA’s Michael Broxton. Their job is to take satellite images from Mars and elsewhere in our solar system, and turn them into maps.

Yes, it sounds like every geek’s dream job, and having a name that sounds like something from a William Gibson novel doesn’t hurt, either. Director of Microsoft Research’s Earth Dan Fay has worked with Broxton to turn these images and maps into an immersive new experience for the Worldwide Telescope.

“NASA had the images and they were open to new ways to share them. Through the WorldWide Telescope we were able to build a user interface at WWT|Mars that would allow people to take advantage of the great content they had,” Fay says.

As far as what kind of imagery you can expect here, one example is a new dataset from the University of Arizona’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), which is a remote-sensing camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. These images are taken in an incredibly high resolution — each image is a gigapixel in size — and the team took all 13,000 HiRISE images and stitched them onto one map. This map, says NASA, is the “highest-resolution map of Mars’s surface ever constructed.”

WorldWide Telescope is available as a desktop application or a web client (which requires Microsoft Silverlight) over at www.worldwidetelescope.org.

Whatever Microsoft paid American Idol host Ryan Seacrest to hype the rollout of Bing's new entertainment search tool Tuesday night was money wasted, as far as William Smead, CEO of Smead Capital Management, is concerned.

Seattle-based Smead Capital holds a large block of Microsoft shares on behalf of institutional investors. It irks Smead that Microsoft is sitting on some $31 billion in cash, pays comparatively low dividends, and yet continues to spend heavily on search advertising, as it has done unprofitably for several years.

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and getting the same result," says Smead, a money manager for more than 30 years. "They're wasting my clients' money and that makes me unhappy."

Microsoft's share price closed Wednesday at $25. 31, down 46 cents, suggesting other big investors were likewise unimpressed by Bing's new Hollywood ties. Even so, Jack Gold, tech industry analyst at J. Gold Associates, says it makes sense for Microsoft to continue investing in search advertising. "While not a key money maker right now for Microsoft, the amount advertisers spend on search ads is growing dramatically," says Gold.

Google, of course, almost single-handedly shaped search advertising into what it is today. In 2009, the search giant generated $23.7 billion in revenue -- 97% of it, or $22.9 billion -- derived from search ads. Advertisers continued to increase what they spent on search ads even through the worst part of the economic downturn, says Matt Rosoff, analyst at research firm Directions on Microsoft.

Now Google is using its dominance of search ads as a springboard to come after Microsoft's core Windows and Office money-makers with Internet-delivered Google Apps initially targeted at small businesses, as we reported in this cover story. By going after search ads, "Microsoft is returning the pressure," says Rosoff.

Yet money manager Smead says Google doesn't really pose much of a threat to Microsoft's massive and deeply-entrenched Windows and Office businesses. Big investors continue to hold Microsoft shares, he says, largely because Windows and Office remain far and away the world's best selling software products, with operating profit margins topping 70%.

And Microsoft is on the verge of enjoying a long run of robust growth in revenue and profits as companies and consumers around the world inevitably begin to replace aging Windows XP and Vista PCs with new Windows 7 PCs, preloaded with Office 2010. And yet Microsoft's share price continues to stagnate -- as it has for most of the past decade -- at roughly half its December 1999 peak, adjusted for splits.

Wall Street remains skeptical about CEO Steve Ballmer's ability to execute his vision to tap into search advertising and make it another Windows/Office-sized profit center, says Smead. The blending of Bing and Yahoo search services later this year is not likely to change the minds of savvy investors. Even if everything about that partnership plays out perfectly, Smead calculates that Microsoft stands to earn only a meager return on the multi-billions it has already poured into its attempt to become a search advertising powerhouse.

Smead would like Microsoft to start paying higher dividends, or to focus on investments that directly strengthen Windows and Office. "They've been squandering massive amounts of free cash flow chasing down rabbit trails," says Smead. "To do this, they've stolen cash that should have gone to the owners of the business, their shareholders."

Gold defends Ballmer's diversification plays. "Bing will be a key strategy for Microsoft's efforts in the Internet cloud, an area it must aggressively attack if it wants to remain profitable and a leading player in the industry long term," says Gold.

But investors' patience could be running out. Microsoft initially entered the consumer Internet space some 15 years ago with the launch of its MSN portal. Today its consumer web pages, anchored by Windows Live services and encompassing Bing,"make up less than 5% of Microsoft's revenues, and is on track to lose about $2 billion this year," notes Rosoff, who has been tracking the company's strategic moves since 2000. Rosoff observes:

The company's track record might give investors pause. Microsoft's consumer online businesses have never been able to turn their large audiences into big money. That said, the relaunch of the search site as Bing in mid-2009 was a positive move. The product is dramatically improved from its early days, and the company has clawed back some market share. So I do think that Bing and the forthcoming deal with Yahoo might stop Google's market share growth. But I would be very surprised if search advertising ever becomes a Windows-sized, or Google-sized, business for Microsoft.

When Google upgraded their Local Business Center to Google Places, it launched the opening salvo in what we expect to be a long war for local advertising dollars.

With local advertising revenues expected to reach $144.9 billion in 2014 according to BIA/Kelsey — and more and more dollars are shifting away from traditional media toward digital media buys — the new war for local ad spend will be a battle between the Internet titans and social networks.

Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Foursquare, Yelp and even Apple are all attempting to carve out their own niche offering for local advertising dollars. Who will succeed remains to be seen, but this is a fight you won’t want to miss.

The War of the Worlds

The challengers fighting for local advertising budgets can be separated into three categories: Search, consumer review sites and social networks. The mobile component to each sector is also quite significant, especially given that the mobile web is taking over the world, and that mobile search is still a nascent space — one that appears to be more app-driven than search-engine driven.

Each category also has its own distinct advantage and key players, but what Google has managed to do with Google Places is straddle all three sectors with an extremely valuable proposition for local businesses that includes free stuff, cheap advertising rates and the promise of exposure.

Google also has a very strong mobile presence, but their adherence to the standard search model for discovery could make them susceptible to competitors vying for local ad dollars.

Search

In the local search space we can include the obvious players: Google and Microsoft, the latter of which will grab more share once the Yahoo search deal is implemented. Both behemoths are fast-adding features to their search services to better facilitate local search queries. Bing even has Foursquare data in maps.

For businesses, the advantages of being highlighted in local search results over competitors is significant. Sure it’s 100% paid media, but it’s also exposure at one of the primary touch points for service and restaurant queries on the web.

Google clearly recognizes the value of a targeted ad. With Google Places they also re-introduced a simpler, faster, cheaper way for their local business customers to advertise (formerly called enhanced listings). Business can pay a $25 per month flat fee to use Tags to make their listings more prominent on Google.com and Google Maps. Included in Tags are Posts, which are like status updates for Place Pages and will appear as part of the search listing.

Tags show up as yellow markers that users can scroll over to view promoted features or coupons. While Tags are ads, they’re essentially Google’s take on Promoted Tweets, and make listings stand out from the crowd. If done right, they could be useful for both businesses and consumers.

When thinking about local search, don’t forget about Twitter. The social network also happens to double as a search engine, and they’re aggressively moving in the local direction with tweet geotagging that can identify points of interest. This extra layer of data will enable Twitter users to search locally, and see a real-time stream of nearby tweets.

Couple these new Twitter features with Promoted Tweets — Twitter’s definition of search advertising — and you have a situation ripe for local businesses. The key here is whether or not Twitter can prove why users should share their location and why local businesses should care.

In thinking about search, remember that mobile will factor into the future in a big way. Steve Jobs believes that most mobile search happens via applications, which means that Apple — which now owns alternative mobile search application Siri — could play an important role in the mobile local advertising battle.

Consumer Review Sites

For the purpose of this post, consumer review sites like Yelp and City Search are being distinguished from other social networks because their primary focus is on user-generated place reviews.

The advertising opportunities on these sites are certainly geared towards the businesses that consumers are reviewing. That could create a conflict of interest for some networks, and in the case of Yelp, many small businesses felt that they were being bullied to pay to advertise in order to remove negative reviews. Yelp has maintained that this was absolutely not the case, and was a misunderstanding of their review filtering process.

As such, they’ve made changes in recent weeks to lessen the confusion, but now that Google Places offers a handful of business-friendly features, we could easily see local businesses jump ship with their advertising budgets.

On this feature front, the addition of service areas is quite significant. So too are the QR code window decals and free business photo shoots. Plus, if Google opts to take Google Maps inside businesses, there will be even more incentive for companies to own their Google Place Page.

In a previous post, I made a case for how the new consumer review is all about you, and that location, premium content and relationships are critical to the relevancy of the consumer review.

In this sense, Foursquare certainly factors into the consumer review equation. Their tips and content partnerships mean that their location-aware mobile social network is perfectly poised to deliver up tightly packaged consumer reviews that are place- and time-relevant. This means that smart local businesses will allocate more of their budgets to checkin rewards and mayor specials.

Lest we forget, there’s a Foursquare-esque component of Google’s Place Pages. All Place Pages include consumer reviews with both text and star ratings. These reviews are also easily accessible via Google Buzz for Mobile and Google Maps.

Social Networks

The primary social networks embroiled in the local advertising war include Twitter, Foursquare, Google and soon Facebook.

Google’s social networking endeavors have left plenty to be desired. Google Buzz launched to an excited tech audience but enthusiasm has since faded away. There’s also Google Latitude — an always-on location-sharing service that started as a Loopt clone — which now has 3 million active users. It’s the intersection of Buzz and Latitude on mobile devices that will help Google nail down local advertising dollars.

Between Buzz for Mobile’s checkin model and Latitude, Google has a lot of information that they can both display for consumer/business use as well as use behind the scenes. Since Buzz checkins are associated with Place Pages and Place Pages have dashboards, Google has the opportunity to compete with Foursquare’s business dashboards. They also have the data to create accurate behavioral analysis around location, based on the implicit location-sharing of Latitude users. Take that and the Google name, and you have something quite compelling.

Unfortunately for Google, Facebook is most certainly moving into the same space. Given their size and trendiness, we can assume that Facebook will be a strong competitor and a viable contender for local advertising dollars. The leaked McDonalds-Facebook location partnership tells us that diners will be able to check-in at restaurants with activity and food items being posted back to Facebook. How exactly this will work or function we don’t know, but what is certain is that once Facebook knows where their 400 million members are, they can target advertising by location.

Twitter is really trying to ramp up relevancy of geo-located tweets, but they’ve never quite been able to do what Foursquare has done — demonstrate the significance of location-sharing. As discussed above, there could be a perfect storm brewing for the day when geo-aware tweets are tied to places and Promoted Tweets are available to all potential advertisers.

Once that happens, we predict that advertisers will be able to target their Promoted Tweets by location and not just keywords (as it stands now). Should they go down this path, this could be their real secret sauce, especially given what we’ve already seen from Virgin America in the Promoted Tweets department.

In the social networking space, don’t count out David — a.k.a. Foursquare — amongst these internet Goliaths. Foursquare has pioneered the location-sharing movement by making checkins valuable, if not cool. The company is hotter than ever, and its partnerships — especially with the likes of Starbucks — continually ensure that it has something the competition doesn’t. Its user base is growing astronomically, and now that the users are there, businesses are clamoring to catch up.

Foursquare has also been nimble in finding ways to cater to local businesses. Early on, it allowed business owners to offer specials to mayors and those that check in. More recently, it introduced a simple way for businesses to sign-up and gain access to the business dashboard with checkin analysis. Its offering not only parallels what Google is doing with Place Pages, but bests it.

By Daniel Lyons

Apple is looking like what Microsoft was 10 years ago—a Bigfoot that squeezes smaller competitors.

A former lieutenant of Steve Jobs's once told me something surprising about his ex-boss. "Steve is a monopolist at heart," he said. "He's just like Bill Gates. He just hasn't been as successful." Well, Jobs is getting there. This summer, Apple's market capitalization surged past Google's, making it the financial king of Silicon Valley. True, Apple still holds only 11 percent of the U.S. consumer PC market, according to researcher NPD, but its influence is far greater than that market share suggests. The iconic iPod dominates its market, and the iTunes music store has sold more than 5 billion songs, making it the No. 1 music retailer in America, ahead of Wal-Mart, according to IDC. Apple's iPhone is the No. 3 smart phone in the United States, according to NPD.

Not long ago Apple was just a niche PC maker selling to diehard fans who were quick to forgive (or even celebrate) Apple's quirks and foibles. But Apple is no longer an underdog. In fact, Apple has started looking like what Microsoft was 10 years ago—a company that so controls certain market segments that smaller competitors can survive only by living on its scraps or staying out of its way. (Apple declined to comment for this story.)

A year ago a small company called Vudu was winning rave reviews for its dynamite little box that attaches to the TV and downloads movies from the Internet. Vudu had advantages over Apple TV: it had a larger catalog of movies, you could rent movies instead of buying them and you didn't need to download the films to a PC first before watching them.

In January Apple struck back, introducing a vastly expanded catalog of movie titles, which it started renting, as well as selling. And it came out with a new, cheaper version of the Apple TV box that matched most of Vudu's features. Now Apple is selling or renting more than 50,000 movies a day, and Vudu is laying off staff. A spokeswoman for Vudu says the company is doing fine. I will point out only that this is what Microsoft's victims used to say, too.

The really scary thing about Apple is that it doesn't just make hit products—it controls entire ecosystems. Just as Microsoft controls both the operating system and the applications that run on top of it, Apple owns popular hardware platforms (iPod, iPhone) and operates the only store that can sell music, movies and software programs for those platforms. Apple sets prices and takes 30 percent of the money.

With iPhone, Apple decides which independent applications will be allowed, and it can pull the plug on any application at any time, without explanation—as happened in July to several developers of iPhone apps. "I spent four weeks trying to get through to Apple via e-mail and phone calls, and they wouldn't return my messages," says Cyrus Najmabadi, developer of an iPhone application called Now Playing, an online movie-theater guide that Apple yanked in July after receiving a complaint about the program. (Najmabadi persisted and finally got Apple to put his application back online; Apple declined to comment on the matter.)

With its retail stores, Apple controls another ecosystem—the market for iPod and iPhone accessories, like speakers and cases. Apple determines when accessory makers can announce new products, and charges them a variety of fees, including one for putting a MADE FOR IPOD sticker on the items. One iPod accessory maker—who insists on anonymity, as he fears reprisal from Apple—gripes that Apple takes up to 75 percent of the sales price, leaving him with zero profit on some of his products when he sells them in Apple stores. This guy plays along because having his products on display in Apple stores builds awareness of his brand, and he can make a profit selling his speaker systems through Best Buy, Target and Circuit City.

Apple's tactics might seem like smart business: why not squeeze every penny out of every deal? The problem is that if Apple squeezes too hard, some partners may go out of business, harming the ecosystem. Bully behavior also invites backlash, as it did for Microsoft when that company rose to power in the 1990s. In the U.K., a regulatory board has banned an Apple advertisement that claimed its iPhone gives you "all the parts of the Internet," when the phone won't display information created using Flash or Java, two popular Web software programs. In Alabama, a woman has filed a class-action lawsuit because her new 3G iPhone won't always attach to a 3G network, which provides faster wireless Web downloads. In July customers howled when Apple rolled out MobileMe, a new online service for synchronizing personal data to the iPhone and iTouch that wound up having some pretty serious glitches. Apple offered three months of free service to subscribers as a form of appeasement.

In the old days, stuff like this didn't matter. Apple was such a fringe player that nobody really cared how the company behaved. I wonder sometimes if Apple misses those days.

Microsoft showed off slick Bing search features and a new online mapping site to reporters Wednesday. The changes are designed to be user-friendly and answer-oriented — a way for the company to try to catch Google online.

Microsoft’s online efforts have been a persistent money loser for the software giant. It desperately wants to siphon off some of Google’s massive profits, which it hoped to start doing this summer by unveiling Bing, its new-and-improved, rebranded search engine. Bing now has 83.3 million unique users a month and has picked up nearly 2 percent of search-market share up to 9.9 percent, compared to Google’s 70 percent share.

“We have definitely broken through (in terms of perception),” said Satya Nadella, who leads the research group for Microsoft’s online services. “It is one of the hottest new brands, which is good news for us.”

Nadella says users continue to engage in long, complex searches online — which feeds into Bing’s focus on helping people complete tasks — such as finding a restaurant or planning a trip.

To that end, Nadella showed off new search features that Microsoft calls “cards,” which are specialized results for prominent entities such as rock bands, corporations, cities and universities.

For musicians, Bing borrows heavily from Yahoo’s visual approach, showing a picture of the band prominently. Then Bing fills out the top results with deep links into the band’s website, as well as links to songs, more images, a concert listing page and even the band’s most recent Twitter post.

A search for the movie “Paranormal Activity” brings up local showtimes and a link to the movie’s preview. A search for “Miami” brings up a hand-curated slideshow of professional quality pictures, alongside links to things to do in that city. A query on “weather in Los Angeles” reveals a page with detailed weather info from three different sources.

Microsoft also made hand-curated pages for top universities, providing a yield that feels much more like a compilation of information than simple pointers to pages that might have your answer.

Bing’s curation strategy seems like a mix of interfaces from other also-ran search sites Yahoo, Ask.com and Kosmix. Clearly Microsoft is trying to differentiate itself from the more streamlined results that Google has slowly started to augment with customized results, as we’ve seen in its recent music search partnerships.

But Microsoft executives stressed they were relying heavily on structured data and not an army of human editors to make those pages.

More impressively, Microsoft also launched a new beta mapping site Wednesday powered by its Adobe-Flash-like Silverlight technology, rather than HTML and JavaScript. It gracefully renders cities in 3-D views using 45-degree aerial photos, paired with traditional satellite and street-based photography. The Silverlight tech makes moving through the city very smooth, losing the jarring changes that are common as you move around various street views in products like Google Maps.

Users can then drop into photosynths — geo-located collections of photos created by users — by dropping their little map onto geo markers, say for example the large collection of photos documenting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Additionally, users can quickly see what places are nearby other places on the map. For instance, you could see what restaurants are near the MOMA, see which ones are best-rated on the web, and then zoom in to see the restaurant.

Finally, the new Silverlight-powered mapping site adds “apps” that let people check out newspaper headlines around the world, see roadside attractions across the United States and map local blog posts onto a city. Another app uses Twitter’s new geo-location features to see Twitter posts as bubbles on the map.

Microsoft also demoed new features that use Silverlight to browse Facebook photos and popular Twitter users, intending to become a better interface for the never-ending streams of information pouring out of social networks.