A hundred million mistakes: Microsoft's Bing search engine

I'm sorry to say, but a $100 million spend on advertising is peanuts in this game. Google's revenues last year were $16 Billion. Two thirds of that, or $10 Billion came from Google owned pages (read search advertising).

So, if my coctail napkin calculations are correct for every 1% share of their search advertising business Microsoft stands to gain roughly $100 million plus punch a competitor in the nose. Not bad. I wouldn't be suprised if Microsoft picked up an additional 5% of the search market with Bing. That means $500 million more in revenue.

People forget that online and search businesses accounted for just $850 million of Microsoft's $60 Billion total revenue last year. Their revenue streams are pretty well diversified, and they can afford to bleed money in search for years if necessary.

Google's primary source of revenue is search and advertising. Any serious loss of market share in that business is going to hit Google where it hurts: the bottom line. They have enough cash to take a few lumps. But, they've been around for 10 years, and they are still clining to a single source of revenue. That puts them in a dangerous position.

I tried really hard, but I just can't take this type of writing seriously.

Summary: Microsoft wants to expand their search market. They plan on spending a lot of money advertising this. This is a bad idea.

Guy who wrote this, listen up:

People do not giving a flying shit about the underlying architechture of any product they use. They do not care about the quality of results. They do not care about the logo on the top.

They care about how they feel when they're using things.

Lets look at apple's ipod. Yes, they are absolutely successful. Why is this? Is it because they have a massively superior product to anybody else? Or is it because they have advertised the living hell out of it to the point of an ipod being a fashion accessory/status symbol?

Haha, ipods are so hip, what, are you behind the times with that other mp3 player? Haha, look at how happy I am with this terrific, iPod, I'm with it! I'm hip!

The ipod isn't better, the feeling is better.

Look at the bing homepage compared to google. They have a nice big graphic on there with lots of colors. Its kindof beautiful. Oh, and the graphic changes all the time! Isn't that great? It's like you'd have to go to the page a few times a day to see all the pictures.

(now I'm adopting that annoying, sarcastic writing style. Sorry)

In search, getting results is the easy part. The part that keeps people coming back isn't content, its the feeling that they get when they're using the product.

It seems like I remember a lot of stories like this about Microsoft before the Xbox came out. Microsoft is going to compete against Sony and Nintendo? Yeah right! --Turns out they did OK.

Maybe Bing will work out and maybe not but that's no reason not to try. I'm sure Microsoft is very aware of the risks involved and the other places it could have invested the money going into Bing. I'm also sure they're aware of the money and power that goes to whomever controls search.

Each search = predictable $$. Spending $100M will increase searches and ad clicks. Which means they will get some, or even more, of that money back. (Could $100M get a higher ROI elsewhere? maybe, but unless you know the revenue per query MSFT makes I wouldn't call the marketing campaign a mistake).

First off, Bing is basically a photocopy of Google with a couple different features. If you put the two side by side you won't get significantly different search results. The only real difference is layout. (video thumbnails, etc) So that being said if Microsoft has a product that is more or less equal at this point they obviously need to advertise it to gain marketshare. Is anyone actually unhappy with Google search? No, not really. So Microsoft's only hope is to at least get a large number of people to try it -- even if they only try it once or twice. There's more opportunity for growth there than simply trying to wait for people to become dissatisfied with Google and search out alternatives on their own.

Very few (if any) Microsoft products have experienced real organic grass roots growth. They've always been forced into the market Top Hat style. Since they don't have any real monopoly to tie Bing into they obviously have to try a different method here. They tried with both MSN and Live to leverage IE for more marketshare and it didn't work. You can't really blame them for trying something different. When you're dealing with a mainstream consumer oriented technology advertising is very important.

I wonder what decision is driving them to screw their chances in other countries. Because that's what they're doing. Anyone who gives it a try outside of the US is probably never going to look back.

One of the reasons for the rebranding was because people wouldn't give Live another chance. Now those same people are gonna see that Bing sucks and that image will get hard printed on their mind.

I already recommended it a couple of times to people in my country and they always tell me it sucks. I'm not gonna spend the extra effort of telling them to switch to the US version. They don't pay me to do that.

What I had really hoped was that Bing had a good search engine for shopping for computer hardware. There really isn't anything great out.

Froogle's ok, but sometimes gets bad results. So that $30 hd turns out to be a $30 cord. And it's kind of hard to comparison shop when you're going by the lowest price, and the lowest price is not the correct item.

I guess that this is an area for a human-powered search engine. Newegg's search is a really awesome example of how good search works. Unfortunately, Newegg is only one company, and I have not found a search engine that does something similar.

He does begin to make a valid point - but he is stil totally wrong. M$ needed a search engine - and Bing is actually pretty good: fast, decent results and useable day to day - it WILL get market share. What they needed was mass excitment to bring people to the engine - hence the huge budget.

And look at the stats already - ok so they might not be sticky stats but that is a HUGE amount of traffic. They are pitching $100 Million on people liking what the see when they visit to check out the hype.

Bing also has very little obvious M$ branding on it - which is another good tactical move to try and avoid the anti-MS vibe affecting opinions.

in all this has been, so far, a great exercise in marketing and product launch.

The crucial thing that proves this guy has no clue what he is talkign about is in the second comment to the blog he replies to a post about how Natal will "change the console world".

> Thanks, BJ... and that's a perfect example of a good > experience getting spread online... you're talking about > Project Natal because you genuinely think it's good, not >because it has a clever ad campaign or because some > talk-show host said "Natal" in a funny voice.

As we've already seen Natal is just an engineered tech demo - all it IS at the moment is marketing hype and a clever ad campaign to swing attention to the Xbox at E3........

It really astounds me when people think that Microsoft has to instantly beat Google. I think they're looking at it from the wrong point of view - They only really need to beat Yahoo at this stage.

Microsoft are throwing $100M dollars at an advertising campaign, when you compare that to the tens of billions they were willing to spend on acquiring Yahoo for their search business last year, its a cheap investment.

Hell, I'd wager that since they'll be recuperating some of the costs through search advertising, that the $100M spent will only be the beginning. I think we will all see more advertising spent in the future.

If Microsoft is serious about search, this $100M is a cheap gambit.

Let's say, hypothetically speaking, that Google's users are so entrenched that they wont be able to steal any of them, yet they do manage to take all of Yahoo's users, that means they still would control essentially half of the search volume that Google would control.

$100M for a glimpse at that outcome is cheap, especially when they have the cash reserves to do it.

So like I said, they just have to steal Yahoo users, which then puts them in a really good position to outdo Google.

If history has shown us anything, when it comes to technology & consumers, the more technically superior solution doesn't always win (eg, betamax vs vhs or IE vs Netscape)

Microsoft needs to take a look at how google became popular in the first place.

I got told told about by a friend at school and how it was much better then yahoo. I didn't believe him but after trying I was really impressed. I then told my parents about it and they had the same reaction I did. Since then my entire family has been using google.

If Microsoft wants to beat google at search they need to invoke the same kind of reaction in people.

I don't agree with the author of the article when he writes that we don't need another search engine. We definitely need alternative search engines here because the quasi total control and monopole on the information funnelled to nearly all internet users is a very serious problem. This is too much power in the hands of one player. In addition to the incredible amount of knowledge it has on everyones searches and thus interests and works, it is in a position that would make it possible to totally bias and corrupt the perception a user can have on knowledge published on the web.

There is also room for improvement in the "experience" provided by google.

But I fully agree with the authors on the evaluation on the Bing stuff. My experience of bing, by comparing search results on the scientific topic I'm working on, where disappointing. Microsoft results appeared to be highly biased toward particular scientific institutions which, I have heard, have some research partnerships with Microsoft.

An advertisement campaign may catch attention, but it won't change the experience perception. A very good point of the article author.

>>According to a Microsoft exec in charge of the launch, "The key will be whether we deliver a product and connect with people emotionally in the advertising."

No doubts, he is a MS guy.

Microsoft's DNA is to copy or buy things, it's simply what they do. It started with QDOS/86DOS.

"Sure, lots of people still pay the upgrade tax on Windows and Office every two years, but only because they have to."

My primary OS is Window's XP, which I got in 2001-ish. That's a little more than 2 years...