14 DAY TRIAL // A year after Microsoft delivered the first taste of Windows 7 via an on-stage demonstration at D: All Things Digital, the technology conference will mark yet another debut for the company. The software giant is reportedly gearing up to unveil to the world the evolution of its search engine. Codenamed Kumo, the upgrade to Live Search will apparently go live come next week, at the same event that was synonymous with the introduction of Windows 7's touch capabilities in 2008. At the time of this article, Microsoft has offered no official confirmation that it is indeed planning to open up Kumo to audiences outside of Redmond.
Still, according to sources close to the company, cited by D: All Things Digital's John Paczkowski, a demonstration of Kumo will be offered at the conference. Microsoft's Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer will make an appearance on stage at the event, but there's no way of telling now whether the CEO will be involved in any way in the Kumo demo.
At the start of March 2009, the software giant indicated that it had debuted the internal testing of Kumo, its next-generation search engine, designed to replace Live Search. Since then, representatives of the company have insisted that Kumo, which means spider and cloud in Japanese, is nothing more than a codename, and not the final brand of the service. The Redmond company is looking not only to organically evolve its search engine, but also to rebrand Live Search with a moniker capable of holding its own against Google.
Kumo is, of course, following the failed negotiations to acquire Yahoo in 2008, Microsoft's strategy to start closing the gap that separates it from Google. And it is quite a gap, as only in the US, in March 2009, Microsoft accounted for just 10.3% of the search market, while Google owned 64.2% and Yahoo had 15.8%, according to Nielsen Online.