[thomasd]

It always felt like Microsoft was chasing after markets that people are trying to leave. Bing trying to replace google search while google is desperately trying to expand their source of income by looking elsewhere while Facebook eats into their google's advertising revenue.

Which makes the last paragraph especially interesting. Insights. Have Microsoft finally figured that search doesn't have much revenue in there to milk anymore and since they have all these data they've collected at such massive scale, perhaps provide useful "interpretation" of these data? That gets me very excited.

And if the result of it all are APIs for developers to use these data, that's going to change a lot on how we make decisions, at least in the entertainment industry (which I work in).

[AznHisoka]

Can you give me a concrete example on how all that data can be beneficial to the entertainment industry?

[thomasd]

Off the top of my head, content acquisition. Which content to acquire, from which production house, with which actors, in what language, how did they do in the theatres. You can compare these indexed data with internal data, and find correlation. Netflix did them all with in house data, and they can do it because they have 114,000 years of streams every month[1]. Their dataset is large enough to pretty much represent what the general public wants. For up and coming companies, this is very helpful.

[1]http://gigaom.com/2013/09/18/building-vs-buying-how-netflix-...