I know I say this all the time, but what bing and any other business that wants to compete with an existing market Goliath has to do is differentiate.
Its all about finding a different way to offer a familiar experience. Its search, its not a new product by any stretch, google has been doing it better than anyone, and its not rocket science. Google has a whole host of compelling services to keep you with them, Gmail, Maps, Earth, Picassa, Apps, Youtube, now Talk.
What can Microsoft offer, for one, they have Live, they could integrate that even more, and market it better as a feature. They have a music service with Zune, they could integrate some of that functionality into the bing experience. They have the still de-facto office standard, they could integrate that into their service package to make using bing as a home page more compelling.
They just need to get their hands dirty and start doing it. Trouble is, the longer I am with google, the more entrenched I get into their services, the harder it is going to be to pull me out, even if they do offer something compelling, so much of my web identity is going to be invested in Google services. So, if bing is going to make a play, they had better get to it, but they can't straight try to beat Google at their own game, they have to differentiate, bing has to offer something new and compelling, or else it will die a slow painful death.
So I've been testing Bing and so far I really like it most of the time. I also spent some time on Blind Search and found that I picked Bing almost as much as I did Google, something I never would have said about pre-Bing MS search.
Thrax
🐌Austin, TX Icrontian
Comments
Its all about finding a different way to offer a familiar experience. Its search, its not a new product by any stretch, google has been doing it better than anyone, and its not rocket science. Google has a whole host of compelling services to keep you with them, Gmail, Maps, Earth, Picassa, Apps, Youtube, now Talk.
What can Microsoft offer, for one, they have Live, they could integrate that even more, and market it better as a feature. They have a music service with Zune, they could integrate some of that functionality into the bing experience. They have the still de-facto office standard, they could integrate that into their service package to make using bing as a home page more compelling.
They just need to get their hands dirty and start doing it. Trouble is, the longer I am with google, the more entrenched I get into their services, the harder it is going to be to pull me out, even if they do offer something compelling, so much of my web identity is going to be invested in Google services. So, if bing is going to make a play, they had better get to it, but they can't straight try to beat Google at their own game, they have to differentiate, bing has to offer something new and compelling, or else it will die a slow painful death.
So I've been testing Bing and so far I really like it most of the time. I also spent some time on Blind Search and found that I picked Bing almost as much as I did Google, something I never would have said about pre-Bing MS search.