Newsweek’s Steven Levy spends some time at Microsoft hq and offers an inside look at the MS search team in the article: For Softies, Search Is the New Black.
The article opens with the following passage:
Bill Gates has a Google thing. When I asked him about the search competition last summer, he turned on the sarcasm. “We’ll never be as cool as them. Every conference you go to, there they are dressed in black, and no one is cooler!” Clearly Gates’s dander was up, not only because the Google upstarts were eating his lunch, but they were press darlings as well. Behind the rant was a taunting subtext: watch me. Bill, you see, had been busy figuring how to get his lunch back.