June 06, 2009
Thoughts on Bing (Not Mine)

Aryk pointed me over to an article on the Good Experience blog. Entitled A hundred million mistakes, you can probably guess that their Bing impressions aren't all that great.

What's the world coming to, when Microsoft can't build a monopoly around a knockoff? It's those effing customers. They keep choosing the best experience.

I was accused recently of hating Microsoft ("hate" is such a strong word) and that I'd never give Bing a fair shake anyway (only partially true). I thought my article a bit ago was fairly fair and perhaps the cold hard truth.

The main gist of the linked article is twofold. First, why the hell is MS trying to compete in the search engine space. Google has it locked up, and lets be perfectly straight, Microsoft's core competency is not the web. They do great operating systems, office apps, and gaming systems. Seriously, I give them 100% honest kudos for those. Even I, a hard and fast Linux lover am excited about Windows 7. You don't need to rule every single market out there.

The second point is that instead of building something better and letting the customers come to it, MS is spending a hundred million dollars (that's $100,000,000, lots of zeros) to advertise it, and in essence, shove it down the consumers throats. In setting up a Windows 7 virtual machine with the new IE 8 the "recommended" settings are live search (which is now Bing of course).

I also was contacted by a company called M80 on behalf of Microsoft pointing me (and my readers) to a series of youtube videos called talking about windows which is blah blah windows marketing. I've also seen a lot more Microsoft-centric / loving / etc random articles just happening to pop up around the web.

Anyway, hit the article for a good read.





Posted by Arcterex at June 06, 2009 08:23 PM