Microsoft has announced that it will launch a major advertising campaign to encourage the UK to start using its Bing search engine. The advertising campaign – which will run across major television stations – will use the slogan ‘Bing and decide’ and is aiming, in Microsoft’s words, to help searchers make more informed decisions. Microsoft’s UK MD Ashley Highfield spoke to TechRadar last month about the need to up public awareness and get people to give Bing a try rather than sticking with search’s 500 pound gorilla Google. PR story to tell “I think [...]

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Yahoo and Microsoft’s long-awaited tie-up in search and advertising has now been given the green light by both the US Department of Justice and the European Commission, with the first signs of implementation beginning in the ‘coming days.’ The ‘search alliance’, announced back in July, had raised questions about competition, but with Google so heavily dominant in the search world, the major bodies have okayed the tie-up. Bing will now serve as the engine for Yahoo’s search, with the latter becoming the ‘exclusive relationship sales force for both companies’ [...]

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Ashley Highfield – one of the senior figures behind the BBC’s iPlayer and now MD of Microsoft in the UK – has told TechRadar that Project Canvas is “potentially a good thing for the television industry”. Project Canvas is a BBC-led consortium that aims to bring a set of standards, marketing and branding to IPTV, in what many commentators are suggesting could do for the technology what Freeview did for digital television, and turn it into a mainstream proposition. Although Canvas has been provisionally green-lighted by the BBC Trust, it remains mired in controversy with [...]

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Microsoft’s UK MD Ashley Highfield has told TechRadar that he wants people to ‘Google in Bing’ saying the company’s still-fledgling search engine is Dyson to Google’s Hoover, and admitting that the software giant may need to take a leaf out of Apple’s book. Highfield passionately believes that Bing is simply a better search product than Google search, admitting that the hardest job will be to convince an apathetic public that it should switch. “Bing is an easier to use, prettier, much more of its age search engine than Google,” asserted Highfield. [...]

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Microsoft’s UK MD Ashley Highfield believes that consumers will soon begin to realise that Internet Explorer offers users a different option to Google Chrome’s tactic of “extracting as much information as they can about you and passing it back to the mothership.” Highfield told TechRadar that he was surprised at just how much data Google’s Chrome browser logs about the user, insisting that privacy is a central pillar to Microsoft’s slower but more secure Internet Explorer. “[Microsoft's] business model is predicated on big enterprise agreements and software [...]

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