Sometimes winning the brand wars is all about timing. Yesterday was Microsoft's day to shine. The software giant released a new product meant to loosen Google's vice grip on the search market. They hope that Bing will change the way people search online. But then a funny thing happened. Google had its own product launch.
While Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was announcing Bing at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego, Google unleashed the Google Wave, a product in development for over four years. And while Ballmer spoke to a room full of executive, a group of Google engineers announced their news to 4,000 developers armed with free Google phones at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco.
Google currently controls about 64% of the online search market. With Yahoo managing about 20%, Microsoft is a distant third with about 10% of the market.
And while Google's new product is not search related, the company was able to steal Microsoft's thunder by piggybacking on their announcement. It probably helped encourage enthusiasm for Google that the company gave all attendees at the I/O Conference free Google Android phones the day before. The company also mentioned on Wednesday that they would have a big announcement the following day. Attendees were primed for the news. And it worked.
Developers bounced out of their chairs with enthusiasm at the announcement of Google's new open source communication tool. TechCrunch even nabbed the above photo of a man jumping from his seat with his laptop over his head. You could say that the Google Wave was met with a bit more excitement than Bing.
And that continued online. News and chatter about Bing quickly shifted to theories on the potential for Google Wave. Today, "Bing" is the 31st most popular search topic on Google Trends, while "Google Wave" is 33. But searches for "bing" also include other things named Bing, including former NBA star and Detroit Mayor Dave Bing and the tagline from HBO's "Sopranos" show "bada bing." Searches for "Microsoft Bing" are down at 63rd on the list.
The Google Trend results point to another problem with the marketing of Bing. It is a common phrase, and it will be hard to distinguish Bing the product from other things that "bing" or are named "bing."
Microsoft hopes that bing will "verb up," (users will "bing" something, they way that we all "google" now) but that could be a source of confusion since the word bing already exists in the lexicon.
We'll have to wait and see. If Bing works better than Google at searching, people will use it. Even if it there are only a subset of people who like it and searches that are bingworthy, the engine will help Microsoft get its foot in the coveted search market.
But the missteps that Microsoft has already made with the Bing rollout point to the fact that the software giant still has a few things to learn from Google.
Based in New York, Meghan Keane is US Editor of Econsultancy. You can follow her on Twitter: @keanesian.
10:54PM on 29th May 2009
We have been hard at work here at Etherpad since Mr. Arrington wrote those words. We have building out our vision of a world where frictionless, really real time collaboration and communication can take place within companies, organizations, educational institutions and anywhere where an internet connection exists. While many of our users and those in the media often called us a Google Docs killer, we never compared ourselves to Google Docs as we fervently believed we were creating a radically different way of approaching collaborative communication and document creation. Today, we are extremely pleased that Google has announced Google Wave at the Google IO Conference. It signals a major belief in the really real time collaboration space.
We were pleased that the Google Wave team acknowledged Etherpad in their white paper: http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/operational-transform
As the pace of really real time innovation is always accelerating, the white paper is already out-dated a day after its release. Etherpad released rich text formatting this evening. We are also excited that the Wave team implemented PlayBack, which is similar to Etherpad’s Time-Slider which we released a demo of months ago: http://etherpad.com/ep/pad/slider/13sentences.
We are massively excited about the potential of the really real time collaboration space to transform the way businesses, educational institutions, non-profits, governments and individuals communicate. We applaud and cheer Google Wave’s efforts as there is plenty of important software to build in the really real time collaboration space and we fervently believe that Etherpad can help Google Wave to usher in a flood of really real time innovation and collaboration.
--Daniel, COO, Etherpad, www.etherpad.com
12:21AM on 30th May 2009
Wow
Web Monitoring Manager at SciVisum.co.uk
2:07PM on 1st June 2009
After watching the 90 min Google wave video... it looks like it could change the whole way the web works. It's Big. How long it will take enough of us to use it, so that it gets critical mass? Dunno.
But making it open source and releasing it to 4,000 software developers means it's got as good a chance as it could have, to get many 'hearts and minds' playing with it and promoting it.
What the average eCommerce site should be planning for - what impacts Wave might have and etc - we'll start to hear about this over the coming weeks I guess.
And as for us performance testers and web monitoring / user experience people... humm, some challenges ahead.
Deri
8:31AM on 7th June 2009
Bing won't work. Too much arbitrary censorship.