Up Front: Ballmer says Bing may be worth investing 10% of Microsoft's income

The Bing marketing push has been a short-term success for Microsoft in that it got people to trying out its search engine, including several of the features Windows Live Search actually already had for a year or more and just never tried...because it was Windows Live Search. But in a speech last night, the man at the top of Microsoft presented what looked like a "moral," like at the end of a bedtime story, the message we're all supposed to have learned...as if Bing's success is a fait accompli. Sometimes when Steve Ballmer starts talking like Tom Osborne, you have to start worrying...and not always for Microsoft.

Search mavens: They've just like us!

Evening of June 18, 2009 • Microsoft's in the search game for the long haul with the deep pockets, and Steve Ballmer wants you to know that. In a talk before the Executives' Club of Chicago, as cited by Dow Jones this morning, the Microsoft CEO said that "in our industry, the No. 1 mistake that people make is that they quit too early" -- and that he thinks Microsoft should have gotten serious sooner about search.

Reuters, meanwhile, caught that he's willing to invest 5-10% of the company's operating income in search for up to five years. (Hope you weren't bored with those Bing ads yet!) Meanwhile, The Guardian's Jemima Kiss has a chat with Sergey Brin, who runs some other search site.

Thomas-Rasset over; Tenenbaum trial orthogonal

Evening of Thursday, June 18 • The verdict (and jaw-dropping jury award) in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset case are probably not the end of that story, though stalwart observers such as Copyright and Campaigns' Ben Sheffner (writing this time for Billboard) are effectively recapping this portion of the proceedings. Meanwhile, Sony v. Tenenbaum -- the Massachusetts case in which Harvard prof Charles Nesson has taken a very, active active interest -- gets quietly, progressively weirder.

Ars Technica, which did work on the Thomas-Rasset trial that far outstripped any of the more traditional media outlets, has this story in check as well, explaining that Dr. Nesson has taken to recording calls and conversations connected to the case and posting them online in an act of "radical transparency." You could also call it "ticking off the judge," who warns that "the Court's indulgence is at an end" on this situation. It's possible you could also call it "crazy like a fox," sinc eit's accomplished some practical good for the case -- for instance, the possibility of raising fair use as a defense. Copyrights and Campaigns has a few excerpts to give you the flavor of what's happening, and Recording Industry vs The People has housekeeping material such as upcoming court dates 9the trial's now slated for a late-July start).

RIM's Q1 nice, but just you wait

Evening of June 18, 2009 • The market didn't like Research in Motion's outlook for the upcoming quarter, even though the company returned $1.12/share, well over analysts' estimates, for this quarter. And, said co-CEO Jim Balsillie, the company's got some "spectacular" products on tap for the latter half of the year.

No, they're not named iPhone or Pre, but that's fine; the company's report indicates that the company's increased its share of the US smartphone market from 40% to 55% in the last six months. Jamie Sturgeon at the Financial Post does a good job of covering the call, and Andrew Horowitz at Seeking Alpha lays out why amid all that optimism, the stock got spanked in after-hours trading following the release of the numbers.

Google learns another lesson about playing nicely with others

Evening of June 16, 2009 • One of the things Google will experience for itself as Chrome comes into full fruition as a Web browser is how difficult it is to maintain a community of developers for plug-ins that have to cooperate with each other. In the meantime, the company's own Apps Sync plug-in for Microsoft Outlook isn't behaving well with a handful of other prominent plug-ins, including Adobe's PDF Maker Toolbar (which a lot of Acrobat users have), Apple's Outlook Change Notifier (part of its suite of synchronization tools that includes Bonjour for Windows), and Microsoft's Outlook Connector which links users to Hotmail and Windows Live Mail.

Some of the things that make these plug-ins blow up in one another's face has to do with the fact that these others make use of Microsoft's Search services. In a blog post earlier this week, a Google product manager explained exactly what happens (Google turns that service off...I suppose that's a public service from Google, thank you very much) and what users should do about that (leave the service off and not use the other folks' plug-ins).

Or, as he put it directly, "Windows Desktop Search will not properly index Google Apps Sync data files, so in order to stop indexing from running indefinitely, the Google Apps Sync installer disables it. We recommend using the default Outlook search."

Anyone who's ever used the default Outlook search knows that's one of the most ridiculous suggestions anyone can ever make.

Microsoft anti-malware basics coming Tuesday

June 23 > Microsoft will release a limited public beta of Microsoft Security Essentials (a.k.a., Morro), an anti-malware package targeting viruses, spyware, rootkits, and trojans. The first 75,000 visitors to download a copy from this site on Tuesday get to play.

If you try that site now, you won't get much except an ironic little message: "The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred."

The company has played with the idea of presenting a basic anti-virus toolkit, either bundled with Windows or downloadable, ever since 2003 when it acquired a small security company, and then at the very least made a home for "Security Essentials" in the original incarnation of Security Center for Windows XP.

The most recent incarnation of Security Center is Action Center for Windows 7, and it's likely that the final build of that product will contain a link to a page that lets the user download the installer -- the same file that will be directly accessible from the Microsoft site on Tuesday. From there, the user will most likely be able to select options and download the final package.

Meet Collecta, a new real-time search... but not just yet

Give it a few more days > Another day another drama search engine. Collecta, the brainchild of AOL and Reuters alumni, searches fast-twitch sites such as Twitter, Flickr, and so forth in very nearly real time, and it's designed to support multiple searches running continuously, giving the thirsty newshound what amounts to his own news ticker.

That's the theory, anyway; when CNET's Josh Lowensohn dropped by Thursday afternoon, the search was having a bit of a meltdown, searching continuously without actually returning results, and we found it much the same early this morning. Over at The Register, Cade Metz delves into how the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) powers the site. When it's working. Get well soon, Collecta!

AFTER THE JUMP: Friday's tech headlines from around the Net...