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.

Comments

[Dave]

P.S. I scrolled up and re-read Susan's excellent article about BING. Inspired by her description of the beautiful BING interface, I went back and opened it.

The background today is a nice, vivid, hi-def picture of the Moon, with several hotspot overlays. Somewhere from the deep recesses of my subconscious, I had the thought that it would be really cool if somehow the image of the moon could be rendered in 3D, and the hotspots could be little identifying markers identifying the places where men landed on the sphere. It would be really cool if I could zoom in enough to see some details. Maybe even see the base of a lunar module still there. I wonder if Microsoft, or maybe another search engine company, will ever develop anything that advanced.

[Dave]

Quick follow up regards textile digital printing. (How off topic can a commenter get? Glad this format of communication is still pretty unrestricted. No offense or disrespect intended. I am willing to BING this concept if necessary...)

Anyway - I asked the universe via you guys for information about "the ability to print onto silk using what looks like an architect's laser printer," and then I waited. On my next visit to Barnes and Nobles, the universe put all of the answers, politely printed and stylishly published, on prominent display in the digital photography section.

"Digital Textile Design" by Melanie Bowles and Ceri Isaac with Amanda Briggs and Kenny Taylor. (ISBN: 978 1 85669 586 2)

Thank you.

[Dave]

Me too. I was loyal to Kirsch's "Infoseek" when one of my Ph.D. brothers-in-law (the Marine biologist) introduced me to this new "Google" thing he was using.

It has been my homepage ever since.

I've been hearing "Bing" here and there. Banter on the amplitude modulation radio dial. Pretty interface. Nice photo. I hear it incorporates Mr. Berners-Lee's concept of the "semantic web." (Although I am not sure how well that is going to work until every cell in every data table everywhere has its own URI.)

But I have yet to run a search on it. I am loyal to Toyota because Toyota was good to me. Not ready to trade up just yet.

Same with Google. I am very happy with Google and Wikipedia just now. (Although I love the idea of the "uncyclopedia.wikia.com" site.

And I am not unwilling to be impressed by that crackerjack team in Redmond.

Anyway, I digress. My wife, who is a very gifted artist with a deeply technical savy mixed in keeps getting drawn back to textiles. To textures. She seems pre-destined to work with fabric in some way. It seems to be tied somehow to her spirit.

Recently, she learned about the ability to print onto silk using what looks like an architect's laser printer.

(If printing is the art of transfering an image onto a medium, I guess this too was bound to happen.)

Any word on this? Anyone know if someone in Boston is doing it yet? She has a couple of CS3 .psd files she wants to test...

[Susan Aldrich]

Cozy with Google -- too true! My Google home page and I snuggle in our pajamas until the weather widget tells me it's safe to get dressed and leave the house. But I don't think that's what you meant. I receive about equal sustenance from Google and Microsoft, and regular readers know I am equally snotty toward Google. If it will cheer fex up, let me share my favorite Google carp: Google's wide-eyed, innocent sincerity in declaring that 9 searches in a row indicates my satisfaction with those 9 Google searches, rather than, Google is bringing me 8 sets of useless results. Microsoft has not been successful in search, by my standards or Microsoft's. It takes no coziness with anyone to observe this. There are a few circumstances which could cause them to beat Google this time, but I don't see those circumstances lined up. The most likely and promising would be, Google starts messing up and driving customers away. It could happen, it usually does at some point with big companies. Until that point, I'm not sanguine that Microsoft will take the share they want of the search market.

[fex]

Just too cozy with Google to be credible :-)

As biased as it gets.