Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

While I'm sticking with Google for search, Microsoft's Bing home page has some of the coolest imagery around.

It's good enough to want to use as a desktop background. I could just do the old "right click, save as desktop" thing in my browser, but that would mean visiting the site regularly (and remembering to do so). So what's the alternative for the lazy user?

It turns out that I actually have lots of options. I first tried a piece of software called ZapBing, but that wasn't a great success (mainly as it managed to violate many of the Windows security features added post-Windows XP). The answer to that problem was a nifty tool called John's Background Switcher.

JBS is one of those tools that does just what you want - and then some. Need to create backdrops on the fly from your photos? From Facebook? From Picasa? From Flickr? From any RSS image feed? It's all in there.

The RSS feed tools are what saves the day here. All you need is the feed from the Bing Image Archive, pushed out by Feedburner [RSS feed link]. You can then set the feed as a source in JBS, and, well, Bob's your proverbial...

[For the more technical of you, if you're running Windows 7, you can actually build a RSS-powered desktop theme following these instructions.]

And yes, that does all mean you can get a desktop feed from I Can Haz Cheezeburger.

Part of thesis in Malcom Gladwell's Outliers is that the underdog wins by changing the rules. The numbers seem to agree with him - in a survey of military conflicts, the underdog (out numbered and out armed) wins only 30% of the time. However, where the underdog changes the rules, introducing new wayus of fighting like guerilla warfare, skirmishing, and other asymmetric techniques, they win nearly 70% of the time.

I've noticed that people are wondering why Microsoft is referring to Bing as a "decision engine". I suspect someone on the Microsoft search marketing team has read Outliers, and has realised that the only way it can compete with the dominance of Google is to move the fight somewhere else altogether. Changing the rules by defining a new category is exactly what it needs to do to take advantage of the relatively slow movement of the incumbent. Smaller, out-gunned and out-marketed, Microsoft needs to write its own rules for internet search. Google has become the verb for search, so Microsoft is moving the discussion away from the search sphere completely.

It's a smart move.

After all, we all need to make decisions, and search engines have become part of that process, especially task specific engines like Kayak and Farecast. Bing is trying to bring task oriented search into the same frame as general search, using contextual inference of user intent to define the results it delivers.

It's just a pity for the Microsoft marketeers that they chose to change the game on the same day as Google did. Now they have to compete with search and real time collaboration in the shape of Wave.

Oops.

It's not Bing vs Google anymore, it's Bing vs Wave. Now things are getting really interesting.