Admit It, Microsoft: You Suck at the Web
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
I think the difference in quality between Google and Bing search results is negligible; at this point it's just a matter of mindshare as to whether people, on average, go to www.google.com or to www.bing.com when they want to look something up. There's no vendor lock-in propping up Google, to the extent that there is behind the Windows or iTunes monopolies. Mindshare can be altered, Microsoft just needs to figure out how to do it.
In technology, it is rare that a leader loses it's place in the market. More often, a new technology is pioneered by a new company that makes the old technology less relevant.
IBM never lost the mainframe market, but did not dominate the PC market. Google did not take over PCs, but dominates search. There are many more examples like this.
There was also a company called Novell that pretty much invented the business of networking PC's, but where are they now?
Google supplanted Altavista largely because they made huge strides in a rather new field. While it's definitely possible, it's a little hard to image someone coming along with a web search that's impressive enough to supplant Google. It's more likely that "search" would evolve into something not entirely comparable to today's search, and replace them.
With search the landscape is a bit different, but we shouldn't be so shortsighted as to count microsoft out of the game or think that bing will never gain >50% marketshare. We could look at articles like this in 3-4 years and laugh out how off the mark it was, just like the articles in game magazines bashing the xbox in the early 2000's.
No, you really can't.
Look at PS3 compared to PS2, GameCube versus nintendo 64, Saturn versus megadrive.
In fact it's practically an industry rule that you always fail after a successful generation of console! A betting man would reckon on the Xbox 3 being a flop.
Wii reached an audience no console ever reached, thanks to the titles and controllers. I'm betting Project Natal will take over a big slice of that market, unless Nintendo really steps it up.
Most xboxes are in teenage boys bedrooms not in living rooms.
The impressive part is how they've been able to convince some people that the xbox is a success.
Ofcourse you can attribute that to my age, and the fact that I don't know too many teenagers, but for the teens in my family, if they are gamers at all, what they have is a PC in their bedroom. Console-gaming is if not exclusively at least largely a social thing, and thus makes more sense to have in a room made for socializing.
While my argument isn't backed by solid data and mostly relies on my own experiences, you can't really claim yours is any better either.
As for as the Xbox 360 goes right now it is a massive success. It is one of the top three consoles in a market where there used to only be two. That's big achievement in itself.
Please, if you're going to compare numbers, be aware of what you're comparing. The Wii, Xbox360 and PS3 are only similar if you're an outsider and can't realize the apple to oranges comparison that's taking place.
The Wii's major feature is that it's a family entertainment system and not a gaming console. The reason it's sold so much is because, as many others have stated, it managed to breach into new market segments. Yet when I talk with any person that dedicates a significant portion of their time to playing games (ie a gamer) they never talk about the Wii, they talk about the Modern Warfare 2, PS3 and Xbox360.
The part of Microsoft that makes xbox along with the zine and PC games made a profit of 0.2 Billion this year and 0.5 Billion the year before.
Large companies tend to walk off their own skyscrapers. Microsoft toppled IBM with the "PC on every desk" mantra. In turn, Microsoft never won on the Internet, because they just never understood that humans network. Phone+cable+Internet companies are begging for a sassy upstart to eat their lunch when competition opens up. American car companies missed game-changing trends in consumer automobiles towards fuel efficiency.
Should Microsoft abandon search? Probably not, but they're more likely to make money if they attack markets that only have awful products. Attacking a market with strong loyalties and gold-standard type products seems like a fool's errand
I have a question regarding Bing, though. A while back, someone here made a suggestion that struck me as brilliant: that Bing provide an option to exclude web pages with Adsense ads on them from search results. This would get rid of untold jungles of webspam and deprive Google of revenue at the same time. Of course it would also exclude many legitimate pages, but webspam has turned into such a horrible problem that at this point I just don't care (especially if the filter were an option I could turn on and off). If MS did this, I would use Bing regularly. I can't think of any other reason to say that.
My question is: what besides accusations of anti-competitive behavior (which strike me as rather weak in this case, MS being far from the monopolist in search) would prevent MS from trying this?
I don't think Microsoft could find a buyer for its online division.
I'll admit some of the web products suck (hotmail?) but not bing, they haven't been able to profit from it. I guess currently they are after marketshare rather than profits. Think of it like a startup burning through some initial VC money to get customers except that they have a lot of money to burn!
Disclaimer: They pay my bills, but am not really a fanboy just not anti-microsoft.
I have no idea whether Facebook makes any money. It can't be easy judging by their desperate attempts to trick users into doing things that are bad for them.
Twitter should make tons of money considering their service is trivial (I know it's not trivial to operate at that scale) and their mindshare huge. But how much money do they make?
Content creators like journalists, authors or musicians find it very difficult to make money as well.
Amazon does make money, but they are a retailer, not a web company I would say.
In my view, it's an open question whether the ad funded web is a viable business model for a lot of companies or just a niche in which very very few big players make all the money.
Can you imagine anyone writing about how Google should just admit they suck at web because they (also) only have a few actually-significant properties on the web?
There's 3 MS and 5 Google properties on this page of the top 20 web properties according to Alexa - http://www.alexa.com/topsites
Neither sucks at web as a whole. But MS sucks at trying to dislodge Google from search and Google sucks at being anything but search (and YouTube, which was already massively successful when they bought it).
Successfully bought and developed
Analytics, Blogger, Google Earth, Picasa etc
Having said that: Bing sucks b*s in Germany.
MS-DOS: v1.0, v2.0, v3.3
Windows: v1.0, v2.0, v3.0
Windows NT: v3.1, v3.51, v4.0
Word for Windows: v1.0, v2.0, v6.0
Visual Basic: v1.0, v2.0, v3.0
There's probably other examples, but I'm not sufficiently familiar with Microsoft's other (or newer) products to list them.
With that said, you just can't apply blanket statements to the company. "Microsoft isn't good at the web" just doesn't really mean anything. The Bing team is for all intents and purposes, a completely different company from the IE team, from the Xbox and Zune teams from DevDiv... How a given team at MS does largely depends on how effective its management is. Some teams have really effective managers, PMs, and developers that can execute. Others don't. There is very little (almost none) energy, process or direction that gets applied across the entire company.
Doesn't that apply to all big corporations to some degree? I think it's a tradeoff between using each individual's potential and utilizing economies of scale. The latter requires coordination of many people, which reduces the leeway for all individuals involved.
Corporate culture is certainly important, but no corporate culture can completely overcome the limitations imposed by utilizing size. At least that's what the ad-hoc scientist in my head says, you know, the one that never reveals any sources ;-)
Sounds like what folks said about desktops in the late 90s. History tells us that the device/PC ends up simply being a way to access the web. Sure, there are always some intensive apps that require the local cpu, but those are rarely for the mass market.
I have an MSN Messenger account but I never use their client for it. I've always used 3rd party applications.