Sometimes I’m very much amused by how the search industry is covered by the media. There were two points covered today. Firstly, Microsoft announced some major updates to Bing, including a major new approach to delivering mapping and geographically oriented services to users. This update brings a rich experience to the client via the Silverlight control as well as a re-imagining of mapping in general in the form of map applications. The second big piece of news was that Google has changed their home page so that some links at the top fade in.
Can you believe it! The links on the page fade in!!!! OMG, we wasted all our time on those damn maps.
Wow Google. Sounds like you finally got a marketing department. Only an idiot high in the food chain in a marketing department would think that the subtle links that they had before were distracting for a site that auto-focuses the search box anyways...
Seriously how completely inane. And can you imagine someone probably got some sort of "Innovation" award/bonus for coming up with that one.
I'd rather see Google spend more time focusing on personalization and less time on stupid things like this "feature" and Google Wave, which is about the biggest most over-hyped piece of garbage ever.
Posted by: Jsin | December 05, 2009 at 08:40 PM
Here's a hint: given that Google's market share in search is 10 times that of Bing, it requires a piece of news 10 times less important to make the front page as for Bing.
Likewise, even minute changes in the Windows 7 UI got more coverage than for example a new version of any other OS. And it's completely normal: it matters to a (lot) lot more people.
Posted by: Sol | December 06, 2009 at 07:25 AM
Sol - that is a great point. Seems obvious now. I guess the final trick is to figure out how the latent negativity around the Microsoft brand has lead to prejudice wrt the Bing brand. We will see something similar with the Google OS.
Posted by: Matthew Hurst | December 06, 2009 at 01:43 PM
Long-time reader, first-time commenter!
The media also weights true (well, at least sexy) innovation over popularity. As such, I think the problem is that the Bing Maps updates weren't as revolutionary as they are described here. While I like the Silverlight controls and I can't speak to the innovation in other improvements to Bing, to call the map applications a "re-imagining of mapping in general" seems quite hyperbolic. From what I can gather, the map applications are effectively dynamic layers. Layers have been around in GIS since the 1960s, and have been known to the public as "mash-ups" for 5+ years. Nothing new there, unless I'm missing something.
Keep up the thought-provoking posts.
Posted by: Brent | December 07, 2009 at 12:18 PM
Welcome to life in third-place marketshare!
You can also look forward to the following:
- Hey, we already had that feature, but now when google adds it, it's big news!
- When google has good earnings, we get crushed because they're taking market share from us. When google has bad earnings, we get crushed because the search economy is doing badly.
Don't worry--once you escape the microsoft bubble you'll see things from everyone else's perspective after a couple months of rehab.
Posted by: Andrew | December 12, 2009 at 09:21 PM