We haven’t followed all the twists and turns very closely since our “Bing or bust?” post, a couple weeks after Bing’s announcement. Taking a fresh look today, what’s most striking is how very little the search-engine landscape has really changed.
According to comScore data, Microsoft’s share of US searches went from 8.0% back in May (just barely pre-Bing) to 9.9 in October. That may sound fairly good on its face, until one takes a closer look and discovers several other factors:
- Microsoft’s share popped above 12 at one point on the strength of the initial Bing buzz …but that level couldn’t be maintained;
- Google’s share over that same period went from 65.0 to 65.4; and
- Yahoo’s dropped from 20.1 to 18.0.
One has to believe that there must be some amount of hand-wringing over these data in the halls of Redmond. Despite the requisite public pronouncements to the contrary, you just gotta believe that the intent was to meaningfully dent Fortress Google, not their own partner-in-waiting Yahoo. Also, one suspects that their business plan probably foresaw a more potent incursion than barely a net 2-point share rise over 5 months.
OK, so there was more than a little bad luck on the timing, rolling out a would-be killer product in the teeth of the worst downturn since the ’30s. But as a mere observer, one can be forgiven for asking… where is the oomph in the marketing? Where are the analysts/bloggers/user-converts saying how life was hardly worth living before Bing? Where is the user education needed to drive home the “why” and “how” of a product that bills itself as “not a search engine… the first decision engine” (whatever that is)? Instead, we’re left to dope all of that out from a couple of TV spots that frankly border on the inscrutable.
It’s not too late to salvage the situation …yet; but if you’re going to storm the castle, you gotta throw everything and the kitchen sink at it. Absent that level of commitment, Bing presently appears headed for the fate of the Edsel and New Coke …or at best, the fate of the four previous MS search-engine efforts.
