Microsoft's Search Talent Power Grab

According to this report Microsoft is continuing its search talent power grab with the focus on Yahoo! alumni. This is interesting for 2 reasons:
1) How is Yahoo! not able to retain these employees or is it that they don't want to?

2) Either the attention is so focused on the relationship between Microsoft and Yahoo! that we are not hearing about the Askers and Googlers defecting or is it Microsoft's strategy to acquire as much knowledge as possible about its possible future Yahoo! acquisition?

Either way Microsoft is acquiring the talent it thinks it needs to gain some ground in search or developing enough corporate espionage to make a valid buy attempt on Yahoo! I think the #2 option is the more likely scenario, but that is my opinion, what is yours.

Kevin's Experience with Internet Explorer 8

Ok I know it is still in a somewhat beta format but since it is being released to the public I will give my experiences and the curious things I found:

1) On initial installation of IE8 the default Search Engine is Google. Is this Microsoft giving up on forcing people into their search engine? Is this Microsoft finally saying to their customers, "Ok we know that you use Google A LOT but please still use our browser to get there"?

2) For all the moves that Microsoft has made to purchase Yahoo they sure don't show that they are interested in their search engine. I had to manually, through several screens, add Yahoo as my preferred search engine whereas Google and Live were easy to access. I would have thought that since I had Yahoo as my default search engine it would have imported that in from the previous IE install. FAIL!

3) To their benefit it does seem to load things faster than IE6 did. So I can't complain about the speed.

4) Some of their embedded features still are a bit buggy. I expect these to be fixed as they release the final version.

5) Lots of similarities to Google Chrome in this release including: the favorites/bookmark icon and how they list those favorites/bookmarks; the tabbing system with recovering recently closed tabs; possibly more as I search more

6) I don't like that I have to click on a tab to enable the X in the tab to close it. Sometimes I search in another tab and find what I am looking for and just want to click the x to close it.


So my quick summary is that if you did not like Google Chrome you will probably not like Internet Explorer 8. A lot of the same functionality is resident in IE8 that was built into Google Chrome and IE7.

The fall of two?

Does the abandonment of the Yahoo! merger by Microsoft mean a fall of two rather than just one. Let's be honest could Yahoo! really actually accept the merger deal? Wouldn't that mean it has accepted defeat, especially for Mr. Yang who has only recently come on board in the last year or so? Seems like the struggle of the power ego's may continue based on Yang's interest in continuing talks. But Ballmer has already called this off once. Is it Microsoft playing hard to get or is it Yahoo!? Who has the most to lose? I say both.