Outside Innovation

Our Search Maven’s Reaction to Microsoft’s Bing

By Susan Aldrich, SVP, Sr. Consultant/Analyst, Patricia Seybold Group

Historically, search has been Microsoft’s Invasion of Russia: huge expense, army turned back in defeat, humiliation, and mass death ensues. Okay, no death involved, but search has not been a happy story in Redmond. Now Microsoft has Bing, the new branding for its Internet search. We are utterly convinced that Bing will boost Microsoft’s market share. Rebranding is essential to getting people to take another look at Microsoft’s search efforts. Microsoft has chosen an interesting name and, furthermore, created a lovely homepage for Bing. Choices are emotional, and Bing is pretty attractive. That alone is enough to get us to use it: we like seeing the Bing home page gracing our browser window, like lovely wallpaper.

Microsoft has a huge campaign planned to call attention to Bing – estimated at $100 million—to get people to give it a try. Microsoft is also offering incentives to people who shop using Bing: Every so often, it offers a cashback bonus. For a time, use of Bing will surge. And some percentage of people who give Bing a try will stay, out of inertia or pleasure. More market share for Bing, less for Google and Yahoo!.

Sure, Bing isn’t as clever as Google, but, for many or even most of our searches, the answers aren’t hard to find. Offering search refinement is a nice touch, when it is offered. It's not always offered. Maybe Bing will prove to be “good enough” for enough people enough of the time, that Microsoft can declare victory. But we’re not counting on it. In the search wars, Microsoft still looks like Napoleon to us.

Google Wave: It’s My Design, but Will I Use It?

I'm pretty sure that I’m responsible for the design of Google's new Wave. I can't take full credit. There are millions of Gmail/Google Chat users like me who no doubt provided the pattern on which Google's new weird communications offering is based.

I haven't yet had the pleasure of trying out Wave. But thanks to early tester, Rafe Needleman's Hands-on with Wave: Weird and quite wonderful, I recognized, right away that I was probably at least partly responsible for the breakthrough design pattern on which Wave is based.

"Getting started in Wave: It looks a lot like e-mail..."

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

People Learn from People

Another pattern I noticed among our Visionaries was the various ways they connect people to people in the online world. As one participant said, “People don’t learn from information; they learn from people.”

On Visionaries’ Web sites, you notice that students can interact with one another, find experts, interact with their coaches and teachers. Customers can connect with other customers with similar issues as well as with their sales team. Consumers can glean tips and tricks from one another. Customers can see a product that someone else has customized and reuse those patterns to create their own customized product. Seekers can look at a graphical network of experts in a particular field and find the people whose expertise has been frequently published or patented. They can see who else is connected to those experts.

Most visionaries seem to feel that part of their job is to connect their customers with one another so they can learn from one another and share experiences. They also believe in connecting customers with internal experts and resources. They recognize that customers’ needs bridge organizational silos and pull employees and subject matter experts together across those silos. They realize that referrals, social networking, and viral marketing are the engines that drive customer acquisition.

How Customer-Centric Visionaries Make Information Valuable

Last week I hosted two very rich customer gatherings: the semiannual meetings of my Pioneers’ and Visionaries’ groups. The tradition in these meetings is one of “show and tell”—clients share what they’ve been working on and seek advice from their peers. There are so many great “aha!s” that came out of both meetings, I’ll be digesting and summarizing the take-aways over the next several weeks.

“Documents” Have Become Interactive Landing Pages

Visionaries don’t present information in the form of flat online documents or lock information up in PDFs (although they make it easy to download and print PDFs). They provide actionable, interactive information in small bite-size chunks. Their “Document 2.0’s” include links to curated, authoritative, structured data, such as:

• Expert ratings
• 3D Molecular models or chemical formulas
• Sortable parameters to help in decision-making
• Rich interactive imagery
• Bills of material with links to product details
• Custom-configured products they can tweak
• Comments and discussions with experts

Check Out Jonathan Clark's Blog: Wheelbarrow Full of Surprises

Jonathan is a witty, thoughtful change agent who is an Executive VP at Elsevier and an effective innovator! Having just enjoyed his company and his commentary at  our semi-annual Visionaries' meeting, I realized that I there's a good way to bathe myself in Jonathan's  optimistic and pragmatic way of approaching problems and exploring issues, by reading his blog: A Wheelbarrow Full of Surprises and being alerted to new posts by his tweets (@jonathanjo). 

For example, in our recent meeting, he talked about complex vs. complicated problems. Complicated problems can be broken into bite-size chunks. Complex problems are tougher:
In his blog post on the topic, I found more eludication:

"I suggest that there are many problems today to which there is no solution or at least no single solution. These are complex problems.

Complex problems are problems with many interdependent variables. There are so many possible combinations of the variables that it hard to see what is going on. The variables are changing all the time as well and so are the interdependencies. Changing in a non-linear fashion makes it very hard to predict what is going to happen. There seem to be many possible solutions and all of them look feasible. The more we work on the problem, the more details we uncover and the more complex it seems to become. And the further away a solution seems to be.

Complicated problems at first sight appear to be similar to complex problems but as we work on them we see the problem becoming simpler, until eventually the problem is solved. However complicated the problem was to start with, we have untangled it and come up with a solution."

Another issue we discussed at great length, since there were many publishers in our group this time, were the changing business models confronting publishers. Many of us aren't very agile when it comes to figuring out the best business model to use. Jonathan was one of many voices who insisted that there is no one model for publishers; rather we need to offer many parallel business models.

Seph Skerritt suggested that the business model falls out when you think about the "job that the customer is trying to do"... Jonathan provides a useful example in his most recent post, in which he frames a "where do I want to take my family camping? scenario:

"For my question: "where to camp in USA in summer?" a Google search and a general travel advice site was useful

For my question: "where to go in Colorado?" a guidebook was best for me

For my question: "which site is best to choose at this campsite?" the personal experience of a fellow camper was helpful

What if I created a publishing environment that provides some free information on initial holiday planning, the opportunity to buy a guidebook, and a section where people can share experiences and photo's? There's a good chance I would choose to buy a guidebook that was part of such a system. If all the information was cross-referenced and inter-linked, it would be even more compelling."