[indygreg2]

I was working at Microsoft/Tellme at the time Bing411 was launched and would like to state a few facts:

- When launched, Bing411 was essentially a re-branding of Tellme's 1-800-555-TELL service.

- 1-800-555-TELL has been running since 2000 or something like that. I attended the 10th anniversary party, which I believe was in 2010.

- Microsoft didn't need to launch a Microsoft-branded 411 to collect utterances, for they had acquired Tellme and had many utterances coming in under their umbrella of services

- Tellme's bread and butter was speech recognition on the telephone and they are still in that space today, so Bing411, 1-800-555-TELL are still relevant for them.

I can also say that a lot of the speculation in the article about Microsoft's "reaction" is just wrong. But, I won't go into specifics because they aren't relevant.

I enjoyed the author's original point about making sure you are playing the same game. Unfortunately, the example used is factually inaccurate.

[sixcorners]

Don't all those points fit into the story in that blog entry? No one is saying that Microsoft needed voice data. From e40's comment: "I think the point of the article is that they don't need to mine utterences with Bing 411, and that they merely did the service to compete with Google, without knowing why Google made the service in the first place." Isn't the speculation about Microsoft's reaction the heart of the issue? If Microsoft did buy Tellme's service so that they could compete with Google's that would explain how Microsoft wasn't playing the same game Google was. Edit: I do agree that the blog post is all speculation. I'm just saying that I don't think those points prove that it is wrong.

[anorwell]

Microsoft bought Tellme (of which 555-TELL was a very small part) in March 2007 [1]. GOOG-411 was announced in April 2007. [2]

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2007/03/14/microsoft-acquires-tellme/

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2007/04/06/google-launches-free-411-bu...

[sixcorners]

From that article: "This is actually a product that Google’s been testing in various formats for some time. Steve Poland (a regular contributor here) is pointing me to some posts (and here) by Greg Sterling from last year that discuss this. The earliest reports on this are from October 2006, and the service may be from an acquisition of 1-877-520-FIND. More information here." Again though.. Pure speculation.. It's not implausible because big companies do keep tabs on their competition. Also not sure if Microsoft's history with their product goes back even further.

[indygreg2]

If I were the product manager of a search engine and our chief competitor had an offering (411) that we didn't (at least branded in our name) and the cost to deploy said offering was cheap (because we already had one very similar due to a recent acquisition), wouldn't it be worth the relatively trivial investment (from a large company's perspective) to deploy said offering? Even if it were for reasons of "me too," so what? I believe most brand managers would reach the same conclusion, especially if the costs were low.

Furthermore, does the track record not show that Microsoft re-brands (assimilates) its acquisitions eventually? How do you (or the author of the linked post) know that the deployment of a Microsoft-branded 411 service was not part of this process?

Finally, everyone in the speech recognition industry knows that it requires a large sample set (utterances) to refine a speech recognition engine. If you are building one from scratch (Google), you will do anything and everything in your power to collect utterances. To think that Microsoft and everyone else in the industry did not recognize what Google was doing with GOOG-411 is preposterous.

[sixcorners]

Given the article that someone cited in their reply to me on this comments page that said that Google has been launching it's product in many forms since October 2006, it still seems possible that they made the decision to buy that company because of Google's actions. As far as everyone knowing what Google was doing, I don't think that is true. Didn't a lot of people think that they were really just trying to get into the 411 business? I mean before they actually launched the product in their labs thing and stated their intention.