azeem.azhar

So Bing may or may not be better than Google, whatever better means. What does better mean?

The trouble is that I love Google and I love the language and tone it uses. They have thought exceptionally hard about how it needs to sound. In the same way Apple thought exceptionally hard about every key on the iPhone. Bing looks like it has been tested to destruction by product marketers, segmenting and segmenting away.

But here are three really easy tricks to make Bing ‘beat’ Google:

1. Allow me access to my Google apps: I use GMail, Gcal and a whole lot of other G’s. Bing tries to force me to change tons of my usage paradigms by sticking a link to Hotmail and Microsoft Maps on its toolbar. The absurdity. It is a lot easier to get me to change search engines than get me to change every other part of my life. Don’t force me to swap an entire user experience when Hotmail doesn’t hold a candle to Gmail.I want to be able to click to my mail from my searchengine, and ideally from my search engine to my mail. (The latter might be harder–possible a Firefox extension or greasemonkey script).

2. Allow me to log-in with my Google ID: Again, my Google ID has become one of my primary IDs, replacing Passport. In fact, I forgot my Passport/MSN password years ago and can’t get through Microsoft’s byzantine password recovery systems so I actually dumped an IM account with a decade’s contacts. Bing is competing on search not trying to capture every share of wallet it can (at least not today). So focus on your core: the search, get that right and maybe over time you can get me to move my ID over to your service. In the meantime, support Google (and Facebook and Twitter).

3. Make the default skin on Bing be exactly like Google’s : It is only a set of CSS changes for crying out loud. My eyes are used to Google. It is not in your corporate DNA to introduce a new usage paradigm, so don’t break what is already fixed. Text on a white background. Blue links, green URLs.

4. (bonus) Don’t be evil. Seriously, stop ramming the rest of your corporate schlock at us.

Microsoft needs to take a lesson from… Microsoft. When it launched Excel, Lotus 1-2-3 was the dominant spreadsheet. They had a neat patented menu structure where you would hit the backslash key and then some letters. Excel came along with this window scheme which people genuinely didn’t like. To make it easier to switchers, Microsoft aped the ‘slash’ menu structure.

For Bing, Microsoft is ramming home a series of corporate messages (about Windows Live,whatever that is) and about Internet Explorer. Come on? Do you want me to use Bing over Google or is this about sucking in a load of your corporate messages? Bing works fine on Firefox. Why not promote Firefox on your home page the way Google used to?

Google’s lacuna is that they are struggling to contain evilness. Microsoft has been the definition of evil (in a geek sense) for close to 20 years now. Google was manifestly less evil than Microsoft. Have spent hundreds of pounds developing Bing why not think about Google’s real lacuna: they promised not to be evil but… are getting more so. So fight back by being less evil: which means less corporate, more open, less suited, less Microsoft.

Popularity: 32% [?]