well, Marissa Mayer of Google explicitly stated in a public announcement in October 2007 that it was going to be used for speech recognition algorithms. And many, many news blogs published that.
Your article makes it seem like the fact that Google was using 411 for voice analysis was somewhat 'unknown' until 2009, whereas I would say that the knowledge was actually quite mainstream and, frankly, hard to ignore.
I would argue that assuming that the Bing team completely failed to see all the news articles and press releases (from Google, no less) about this for 2 years, is perhaps a little presumptuous? Maybe, as another poster mentioned, they are still getting value out of the 411 service?
I do agree with your point, and there are many many times I've seen companies do this, but Bing 411 vs Google 411 might not be the right example since Google's intentions were very clear, right from the start.
Disclaimer: I work on MS Office (completely unrelated to Bing & the 411 service, but still not what you would call an unbiased source)
http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-management/google-wants-your...
Your article makes it seem like the fact that Google was using 411 for voice analysis was somewhat 'unknown' until 2009, whereas I would say that the knowledge was actually quite mainstream and, frankly, hard to ignore.
I would argue that assuming that the Bing team completely failed to see all the news articles and press releases (from Google, no less) about this for 2 years, is perhaps a little presumptuous? Maybe, as another poster mentioned, they are still getting value out of the 411 service?
I do agree with your point, and there are many many times I've seen companies do this, but Bing 411 vs Google 411 might not be the right example since Google's intentions were very clear, right from the start.
Disclaimer: I work on MS Office (completely unrelated to Bing & the 411 service, but still not what you would call an unbiased source)