Here is a post I am not ready to finish. However I feel I have to. As you know News and Medias really enjoy this topic because they want to get the headlines by announcing that one cut the head off of Google.
The truth is that it is not gonna happen and I am going to explain why.
Firstly those kind of news are on the web for ages. I started to study seriously the search engine market in 2007 and so called new competitors are coming every two weeks claiming that they are going kick Google ass... well I guess those guys never put a foot in a marketing class. Last summer we heared about Cuil which made a lot of noise and which will be as successful as the Dasani water from Coca-Cola. We are going to have exactly the same story with Bing from Microsoft. Bing is not yet on the market but I can already predict that it is going to be a big flop after a small increase of visitors due to a mass advertising campaign.
Why am I so critical?
Well from what I saw until now the vision I have about Microsoft web search is still the one shows by the study untitled "Search engine user attitudes" from the company iProspect, published in April-May 2004:
It showed that MSN users found that commercial links were more relevant than the common search results... whao can you imagine it? It is true that it was 5 years ago and that the perception may have changed. Five years ago the vision that people had about Yahoo and Google was the following:
Well I don't know for you but I still have this perception today, Google is more relevant than Yahoo which is more relevant Microsoft Live Search and I would even say that this last one is always giving me some results that I even do not consider.
My second point is about capital, assets and experience. All search engine leaders which are today on the market are no more providing only a search experience. As an example if you use Google then you have a gmail account, if you use Yahoo then you use a Yahoo account etc etc...
So today people need far more than a simple web page where the request of their query will be process. People want something convenient with everything at the same place.
Look at the number of services which are providing the five biggest search engines and you will see that being first requires an incredible experience and amount of capital. There is still some places for alternative technologies and Twitter showed it. But Twitter is not a search engine in itself.
My third point is that Google is too strong and too innovative. So I explain Google is representing 62% of the world search market. Google know then what 62% of Internet users is looking for and what are their expectations. Google is recruiting all the best brains, if I remember well Google USA received 1,000 cv a day... in 2002 can we imagine today how many cv they get? So they have the best brains, may have the biggest database ever on consumer expectations and they can offer them the luxe of allowing their engineers to dedicate 20% of their work time to what they like. So the management method "Treat your employees as your customers" is by far respected by this company. How can they failed?
My fourth point is about Google Wave. Most of you may have heard about it, it is the new generation of emails which can only destroy everything... I don't have a clue how many Gmail will be created because of it... but it is gonna be legendary.
My last point is that Google is too cool. Even if we hear about the data privacy issues and the recent bugs that Google faced how can we say no to a company which is providing everything for free, giving us possibilities to make business and which is not locking us in.
As a conclusion I would say that after more than one year of studying the market if Google is intelligent enough(and I think it is) it is gonna beat Microsoft on the long run and can put a new economical order.
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