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Sabeer Bhatia, one of the co-founders of Hotmail (bought by Microsoft for $400 million ten years ago), is on a mission to lobotomize Microsoft's $20 billion Office business. He has an uphill climb.

Bhatia is behind Live Documents, a web-based competitor to Microsoft Word, which purports to offer enterprises an upgrade path beyond the $400/seat offer from Microsoft. The question is, "Don't we already have Google Docs for this?"

Designed to help consumers avoid expensive upgrades and to foster collaboration on a secure internet platform, Live Documents matches features found in Office 2007, the most recent version. It will be given away to individuals with 100MB of free data storage space per user. Companies will pay for the system, either hosted remotely or on an internal server, at a discount to Microsoft?s licensed technology. Aricent, an Indian software services group with 6,700 employees, is the first client.… Read more

Why is search so focused on the past when what I really want to search is the present?

I occasionally check in on Google to see what it thinks of me. Or, rather, what it makes of the links that connect back to "Matt Asay." For months I've been wondering why it continues to show old data when I google my name.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it puts my Blogger (owned by Google) blog first, despite the fact that I rarely update it anymore now that I blog at CNET. In fact, it has Blogger and my Blogger profile among the top-ten results, despite the fact that these are hardly the most informative/useful links for me.

It then links (twice in the top ten) to my old InfoWorld blog. I posted a lot of stuff there over the two years I was with InfoWorld, but with nearly 1,000 posts on CNET since July, including links from Valleywag, Slashdot, CIO.com, O'Reilly, etc., you'd think that Google would hit "refresh" and update the results that "Matt Asay" yields.

This would be somewhat academic except that both Yahoo and MSN Live both return results that are much more in keeping with who I am, and what I'm currently up to. Is Google search mired in the past?… Read more

Yahoo announced on Tuesday that it has expanded its partnership with music mega-label Sony BMG to bring the company's music videos to its Yahoo Video platform.

The two companies already have an existing content deal, but this expanded agreement will add more video to Yahoo's catalog and allow Sony BMG artists' audio to be used in user-generated Yahoo audiovisual content. Additionally, Sony BMG media on Yahoo will be available in more regions across the globe.

Sony BMG artists include Bruce Springsteen, Alicia Keys, Bob Dylan, Britney Spears, and Avril Lavigne.

This is the latest in a series of … Read more

While Yelp, Yahoo Local, Zagat, Michelin and others can provide a fairly clear picture of whether or not an eatery is worth going to, there's another resource called CleanScores that takes a scientific approach--health inspection scores. Since scores are public, CleanScores takes that data along with a track record of all infractions, and turns them into an eye-friendly, searchable database. While only good for San Francisco and Los Angeles residents at the moment, the site is eventually planning to expand out to other parts of the United States.

What makes the service really useful (besides finding out your favorite … Read more

One of the primary problems with sites like Facebook and MySpace is that they provide a somewhat specious view of one's "social graph" (dumb but popular way of saying "true network of relationships"). I have ~2,400 people in my address book, but only a fraction of those are true "friends" in the sense that normal people use the term. My email system (as well as my phone records and IM history) knows exactly who are my real friends (as Tim O'Reilly frequently notes). Friendship without communication is...not really friendship.

Now the New York Times is reporting that Google and Yahoo are merging social networking into the place where most true networks converge: email.

Ignore Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360. Google and Yahoo have come up with new and very similar plans to respond to the challenge from MySpace and Facebook: They hope to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks.

Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph - the connections between people.… Read more

In a sign that the web world finally recognizes its debt to open source, Yahoo is opening up an advanced research and development center - with a massive computing lab - to allow developers and researchers to test their systems software. In other words, Yahoo is opening up one of its labs to let people experiment with Yahoo/Internet-scale applications.

This is very cool.

Sunnyvale-based Yahoo said the program is intended to leverage its leadership in Hadoop, an open source distributed computing sub-project of the Apache Software Foundation, to enable researchers to modify and evaluate the systems software running on a 4,000 processor supercomputer provided by Yahoo.… Read more

On Wednesday or Thursday, Yahoo is going to revamp its directory of desktop widgets for the Yahoo Widget Engine. This is warm-up for a whole new version of the Engine, Yahoo Widget Engine 4.5, that arrives the week of November 27.

End users won't see much that's new in the engine itself, but they'll see a shift in how it is pitched. The new directory should be easier to navigate and more approachable. Yahoo, instead of trying to sell end-users on the engine and then push the widgets, will instead begin to pitch the utility and … Read more