Berkowitz quotes give some insight

Microsoft said Friday it has hired Steve Berkowitz, the head of Ask.com (formerly AskJeeves), to succeed David Cole as senior vice president overseeing MSN and Windows Live. Presented here for your perusal are quotes from Berkowitz over the years. They're not especially titillating or dramatic but might give insight into the man moving into MSN's top spot:

"It really takes a long time to develop trust with a consumer. I mean, look, Google announced Gmail thinking they had the best brand in the world, the most trusted brand in the world, and there was a backlash." — eWeek, July 9, 2004

"Jeeves is sitting in a position today that is so different from a year or two years ago, where we sat in some cases on a precipice." — San Francisco Chronicle, July 19, 2004

"If some people are upset about the butler going away, so be it. As more people come to our site and are satisfied with the results they get, they are going to forget the butler." — on Jeeves the butler being removed from the site, The Associated Press, Feb. 27, 2006

"We know our technology is awesome, but our biggest challenge is to get people to understand we're not a question-and-answer product." — eWeek, Aug. 9, 2005

"When you go into a store and you watch how people buy books and reference books specifically, they open the book, they look at the table of contents and they look at the index. What is the index but search? Search, to me, wasn't a revolutionary idea. It was evolutionary." — San Jose Mercury News, April 9, 2006

Two fins

The Red Fin restaurant, in the Hotel Max in Seattle, is a stone's throw away from Redfin, the real-estate Web site and broker downtown. The two aren't connected, other than being on the receiving end of some awkward phone calls.

"There really is no connection other than that we receive a lot of misguided dinner reservation requests, and their waiting staff is probably asked how to best apply their commission refund to their closing costs," said Redfin spokesman Bahn Lee.

Perhaps the Fins can combine services. Would you like a duplex with your sushi?

The DailyCandy.com, a free daily newsletter listing everything that's hip and cool or undiscovered, offers a tech lexicon. Here are a few:

A.I.M. v. To actively ignore messages from annoying chat buddies while blaming the server for the lost connection.

bee break n. The act of sneaking off to the bathroom during dinner to scroll through one's BlackBerry.

block-listed adj. Permanently banned from all modes of virtual communication.

e-mnesia n. The condition of having sent or received an e-mail and having no recollection of it whatsoever.

overshared server n. A person who consistently hits "Reply All" when he/she should hit "Reply," thus subjecting everyone on the e-mail list to an irrelevant personal note.

Download, a column of items, notes and miscellany, can be reached at 206-464-2265 or biztech@seattletimes.com.