Bing!
Today marks the launch of Microsoft’s latest attempt to compete with Google: www.bing.com. This new product from Microsoft is a search engine which has been heavily invested in and will be advertised in the same manner, boasting a marketing budget of $80M to $100M. Microsoft’s differentiation strategy for “bing” is that it is a smarter search engine or really what they have coined as a “decision engine” (meaning it makes actual decisions in the search process to provide better information for a better search experience). http://www.discoverbing.com/welcome/
I used the site this morning and I really think Microsoft has made a step in the right direction. They learned a valuable lesson from Google: with the information overload the internet offers, simplicity is key. I believe that by just providing the bare essentials on the “bing” homepage, Microsoft will find a much higher degree of success than their former search engine attempt – Microsoft Live. Additional features like an image based background may prove to be quite interesting given the fact that Microsoft has proposed user submittal contests to determine the background image for particular days.
Former MIT Media Lab graphic designer and current president of RISD John Maeda is someone I admire and have followed for about a year. He is a clear advocate for the advantages the simplicity school of thought has to offer in all facets of life. He has written books and spoken at symposiums about how to simply your life, work, and designs to enjoy a happier life. This is an idea Google prescribed to long ago and it is obvious where it has taken them: the top (having about 60% of all internet search traffic and establishing their brand as a verb in everyday life).
Check out Maeda’s blog on simplicity, he doesn’t maintain it as actively after joining RISD but it still has some very interesting information.
Microsoft may have risen to success by developing innovative software but they are clearly in a mature stage of their business cycle. While it’s inevitable that the name “Microsoft” will have a negative stigma no matter what (thanks to years of creative advertising by Apple), I think they have finally seen the light. Bing has not been an attempt to reinvent the search engine wheel but rather uses proven aesthetics in combination with an enhanced search algorithm to offer a competitive product.