Trouble at mill for latest member of “Cloud” family…
Swedish company Spotify has recieved much critical acclaim for its music streaming service over the last few months. With a new round of investment valuing it at $250 million, the start-up goes from strength to strength. 
I’m an unashamedly huge fan of spotify, which (for those of you who don’t know) is an itunes-esq desktop music client that uses a mixture of P2P/Direct streaming to place a library of over 3.5 millions tracks at the user’s disposal … virtually instantly. I’m not alone in this opinion either, and spotify has been widely welcomed, both by an internet community sick & tired of fighting the outdated business models and practices of Industry labels, and by proponents of the “Cloud” computing model that has gained so much media focus recently.
Perhaps the music labels too realise that spotify is a way of angling across the current of the increasingly powerful anti-copyright lobby ? The significant shares owned by labels such as Sony would seem to support this theory.
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Yahoo! brass scoffs at Bing – “Won’t save Microsoft search”
Yesterday thebusinessinsider.com reported that the CEO of Yahoo Carol Bartz gave bing the rough side of her tongue, claiming it wouldn’t create that long 
term shift in the search market share that microsoft so desperately want.
Prediciting the new search engines inevitable (as she see’s it) fade into obscurity, following on from the initial period of interest that Bing will currently be enjoying, Bartz said “It’s interesting but not over-the-top interesting, People will keep the same habits.”
So Bing has failed to impress everyone then, but on the other hand – what else could one expect the CEO of Yahoo! to say about microsofts new baby ? She was hardly likely to shower it in praise if you ask me, what with the whole Yahoo!/Microsoft deal debacle still ongoing, and the fact that they are direct competitors, fighting over market share.
The comments are to be taken with a pinch of salt then, but perhaps there is something to take away from this. Bing is Live with a lick of paint, a very good lick of paint to be fair … but underneath its still the same old search we know and use every day. The search that google still does perfectly well .
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