Thursday, May 19, 2005

Microsoft takes on the information glut

Jay Greene at BusinessWeek reports that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is about to give a speech where he "will talk about how businesses can help workers wade through the information glut" and "will unveil a whole new vision for Microsoft about the way people use information."
    Workers are increasingly deluged with e-mail and instant messages. They can troll through scads of information on the Web and in corporate databases. But finding just what they need when they need it is tough.

    "The software challenges that lie ahead are less about getting access to the information people need, and more about making sense of the information they have," Gates writes.
We are overwhelmed by all the information coming at us in our daily lives. We need something that makes sense of the chaos, that orders and filters the information streams.

Personalization must be part of this vision. Search can help you find things when you already know what you want; personalization helps surface useful information when you don't already know what you want.

Personalization offers a way to find focus. It learns what you like, shows you what you want to see, and filters out the rest. It extracts knowledge from the information chaos and helps you get the information you need.

[Found on Findory]

1 comment:

mb said...

Nearly simultaneous with Microsoft's announcement, today Google announced a new focus on selling to corporate IT departments, not just corporate advertising departments.

This will be an uphill battle for Google, especially with Microsoft coming in hard with a focus on enterprise search. Microsoft knows how to sell to the corporate IT customer and has extensive infrastructure already in place. This is likely to be a bruising battle for Google, no matter how good their products are.