Did you ever stop to wonder with all that knowledge there for the taking, why libraries were always so quiet?

Maybe it was because the librarians chose the books that were there. And while I’ve got nothing against librarians particularly, I don’t really feel they’re qualified to pick my reading material.

A little unfair, perhaps. But that’s the feeling I came away with from a meeting with Jordi Ribas, Microsoft’s General Manager for Search. He’s very proud of bing. And justifiably so.

After all, he’s designed a really great product. Its truly, very clever. Lots of smart features. But are they what we want, or just what he thinks we should have?

Jordi Ribas – innovator, scientist and working for Microsoft

Jordi Ribas is very good at his job. He’s coming up to 10 years with Microsoft and one of today’s great technologists. Hey, this guy holds 21 patents for HD media compression and decoding techniques. Crucially, he majored in artificial intelligence at college.

Before Microsoft, he was with Sharp and NTT in Japan. He led Microsoft’s codec design team for Media Player. He’s personable, modest and a really nice guy, a gentleman.

I was having a one-on-one meeting with a very important guy. He wanted to show me stuff, but I’m a technology strategist and interrupted him often to throw in what I wanted to say. Graciously, he listened patiently and answered me thoughtfully and continued.

But I’m wondering has he got it right. I don’t mean bing as a product, but has he got us right. Is bing right for today’s socially driven Internet?

Search has moved on. Google gives us the chance to interact and we expect the Internet to know and respond to us, not blast stuff at us. We expect the Internet to understand us. In other words, to be sociable with us.

bing – unsociable working?

Anyway, let’s talk about bing for a moment and come back to my point about social working. bing is aesthetically nice. It looks good. It’s fast, it stores searches and updates them, like Google. It has paid for results down one side, like Google. It can be aimed at the UK or expanded globally, again, just like Google.

A bit of a common theme running here, its like Google. But it does other stuff. I like the page summary if you hover over a result. That’s clever and saves you wasting time looking at pages that aren’t really what you’re looking for.

But Google has stuff that bing doesn’t. Google let’s you take stuff out you don’t want. Google let’s you order the search results relevant to your needs. That’s the social interaction thing I was talking about… and Google lets you comment!

bing’s bulging with features. It has Microsoft’s Ciao shopping product bolted on providing opinions and ratings. For travel reviews, it bolts on a travel product from someone else. For sports, Sky’s Sports is bolted on. It even has bolt-ons for Facebook and Twitter.

But that’s not smart, that’s just a mash-up, a collage of stuff roughly attached. Nothing is integrated, it doesn’t learn about me, there’s no 3rd generation stuff, no Web 3-dot-zero. bing’s just not personal, I guess I’m saying, it’s not me.

Where’s the personalisation, Jordi?

I asked Jordi why he showed bing without signing in. And signed in, why bing added no extra value. I asked why the results weren’t tuned to my needs, my location, my interests, why didn’t bing recognise me, Neil Robinson, instead of some focus group?

He told me he worried about privacy issues. I guess Microsoft’s running scared with so many trust judgements against it. But Google is offering a far more personal experience. Jordi shook his head, almost in disapproval of what Google is doing – and doing well, too. Then again, would Google be doing this if bing wasn’t there, pushing the technology along?

Google has a different take on things. And this is where Jordi will struggle. Microsoft sees short term gains as its primary goal. It wants pay-back and it wants it into its own pocket and sees anyone outside of that as a threat.

Google also needs to make money, of course. But it sees social collaboration as the way forward. Google doesn’t bolt on, it opens up its code to the world and invites innovation. Everything becomes almost a socio-technological eco-system in its own right.

One man versus the Open Source community

And this is bing’s and Jordi’s greatest challenge. Can Jordi bring to bing the global talent that Google is so receptive too. Can Jordi do it all himself. Well. he’s a clever guy, as I said. But unfortunately for him, he’s a clever guy working for Microsoft.

Note: This is the second post I’ve written about bing. You can see the original one here.