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