- How Microsoft made a Bing mistake
- July 19, 2012 | by Mark Hurst | 6 Comments
What happens when you spend on advertising rather than the customer experience? Back in June 2009 I wrote about Microsoft's launch of Bing, its search engine, in a column called A hundred million mistakes. As the name indicates, I wasn't too positive on the maneuver. Here's an excerpt:
Microsoft's strategy, to win market share from Google, is not to compete on user experience. No. Microsoft's strategy is to advertise the heck out of the thing and hope people flock to the site.
They are spending - wait, let me try my best "Dr. Evil" voice - one hundred million dollars to order the world to use their search engine. According to a Microsoft exec in charge of the launch, "The key will be whether we deliver a product and connect with people emotionally in the advertising."
Well, it's three years later and time to see how the experiment worked out. A few weeks ago a New York Times article reported that Microsoft's online services division suffered a loss of 260 million dollars last year.
Wait a second, I'm getting an alert from my fact-checking team... ahh, yes, I typed that figure wrong. Microsoft's online services division lost 2.6 billion dollars in the last fiscal year. That is just wow. A pretty decisive result.
I should clarify that there is nothing wrong with paying to run ads and promote a good product. But it requires just that, a good product - something with a distinctly better customer experience than the competitor. Any time you hear an executive going on about "creating an emotional connection," watch out. Especially in a goal-directed experience like search, people want something simple and quick, not some kind of emotional bond.
Despite some recent misfires in other products, Google continues to offer an outstanding search experience. It's really simple to describe: you search for something, you get some good results, you click one of them and leave Google. The experience is fast and easy. To put it another way, there's no obvious pain point that customers are dying to get solved. If anything, what customers might want most of all is for Google not to change anything - by, say, cluttering its results and generally mucking up the experience.
In Bing's case, Microsoft did the following:
• Bing challenged a competitor that already offered a great experience, setting up an incredibly difficult strategic challenge.
• Bing was unable to offer a remarkably better search experience, so users didn't switch from Google to Bing.
• When that didn't work, Bing began pushing more features and data into its interface, in a new third column of results called the Sidebar.
This new feature, the result of a partnership with Facebook, launched in May (source). The Sidebar appears on every search results page - it can't be disabled - and asks users to log into Facebook. If the user logs in, the search includes friends' feeds, and can even poll their responses to the search query.
The Sidebar raises an interesting (say, 2-billion-dollar) question. Was the feature designed because Bing partnered with Facebook? Or because users had a pain point, like they were saying they really wanted their Facebook friends to weigh in on their searches?
I keep bringing up pain points because they are often the basis for a great strategy. But to find them, you have to elevate users over other concerns like 3rd-party partnerships. For example, here's one pain point some users have in search: they don't like being tracked. As pointed out in this well-designed explanation, most search engines track your queries and sell them to whoever will buy them. (I can't imagine what these users think about sharing their queries with Facebook and all their friends.) The search engine that created the explanation, DuckDuckGo, offers a unique customer experience: it doesn't save your search queries. That is an idea you can build a search engine with.
Meantime, the Wall Street Journal reported this month that Microsoft is still trying to figure out how to fix their Bing mistake:
Despite Bing's lagging market share, Microsoft executives say they are working to improve Web search for users, and they say Bing has features, including a tie-in with Facebook Inc., that help it stand out from Google.
I wonder how that will turn out. Microsoft's plan so far has been to mimic the leader (Google), and chase after partners (Facebook). Neither strategy has worked. There's another path for Microsoft - and for every company and team out there - and that is to listen to its customers. Especially for Microsoft, there are plenty of ways to delight customers, since there are so very many pain points to address.
Users don't want Microsoft to improve Web search. They find things just fine on Google. What they want is a better email program, a better calendar, a better Office suite, dare I say a better operating system,... the list is long. There are SO many things to work on, and they don't involve begging the world - with a huge ad budget - to stop using Google.
When I got back recently from China, I posted this:
Coming back from China I feel like Doc at the end of the movie: wild-haired and raving.. "where we're going, we don't need roads."
Seriously, it was like taking a time machine 10 years into the future. Kept thinking, how come no one ever told me about this?
Americans & Europeans need to decide which decade - or perhaps century - they'd like to work in. China is barreling into the future already.
In a little over a week in China, I experienced what felt like a few months' worth of sights, sounds, and ideas. I was invited there by Kevin Kelly, cofounder of Wired magazine, who I've always admired and pointed readers to many times over the years. We visited four cities and presented at two Internet companies and one conference. (I spoke about customer experience, a topic of great interest for the fast-growing Internet economy there.)
China is too big, and moving too fast, for anyone to give a summary. I only got a tiny glimpse. But I can tell you that I saw a lot that hasn't been covered in the media. If there's a headline from my trip, it's this: We don't know what's going on in China, and the narrative being presented by the (western) media is grossly insufficient for understanding it.
With that said, here are four pictures from my trip from each of the four cities I visited.
Shenzhen: At left, a photo from downtown Shenzhen. (Yes, that Shenzhen - with the Foxconn factory and all the headlines.) This is inside the Shenzhen public library, on a weeknight at 7pm. Spacious, modern, spotless, and quiet - it was packed with Chinese, most apparently in their 20s, bent over books, journals, or computer screens, studying. Across the street - actually across a lovely public park - is what is billed as the world's largest bookstore, where the scene was repeated: crowded with eager readers.
I wish this image would help Americans rethink their image of China, or at least Shenzhen: it was the least polluted city I saw, and visiting Foxconn (Kevin Kelly wrote about our Foxconn visit) - and touring a competitor's assembly line - showed no sign of the apocalyptic industrial wasteland I had been promised by media reports. Sometime I'd like to do a column just on what I saw in Shenzhen - including the genomics facility that I found equally surprising. More to say, another time.
Yiwu: The "city of small commodities," according to the website, and they're not kidding. The center of this small town, a couple hours away from Shanghai, is a set of buildings housing a commodities market with tens of thousands of stalls like the one pictured at left. Every small item - every comb, knitted belt, pen, every plastic dollar-store item you can dream of - has a stall, or set of stalls, or an entire wing of a building. It's like something out of Douglas Adams: the infinite wholesale trade show of the universe! In one building, the entire first floor - with hundreds of stalls - is devoted exclusively to socks. Walking through here is a mind-bending experience of physically traversing the database of every small item the human race manufactures today.
Hangzhou: This is a provincial capital about a hundred miles (180 km) southwest of Shanghai - a favorite for Chinese tourists and a tech hub, serving as the headquarters for Alibaba Group (where we spoke) and a number of other tech firms. At left: we toured the China Academy of Art, whose Hangzhou campus was chiefly designed by Wang Shu (the first Chinese winner of the Pritzker Prize). At dinner with Wang Shu that night, we learned about his intent to use found materials, and traditional Chinese forms, to create a new architecture - sustainable, and specifically Chinese - for the 21st century. I'd like to think Wang Shu's thoughtful, reasonable vision would win out over the competing trend of breakneck, unsustainable development - but I don't think that will be the case.
Beijing: We gave two presentations here, including one at a Tencent event alongside Pony Ma, the young founder of the company. I had been to Beijing before - impressive, bustling, modern - and it is all of those things. But I was surprised by the high degree of air pollution, which I understand is present on most days. (This post describes the tension surrounding the American embassy's installation of air-quality monitors. Even more context in this excellent James Fallows piece.) At left, a stand at the Beijing night market featuring roasted scorpions. I opted for some delicious crab dumplings.
For his part, Kevin Kelly put together a clever video showing his Asia trip (which included China and several other countries) as a series of one-second scenes. If you have two minutes, I'd recommend it as an insightful glimpse into Asia today.
As for media coverage of China, my favorite source is The Atlantic's James Fallows, whose book Postcards from Tomorrow Square, sourced mostly from his Atlantic columns, gives the most accurate depiction of what I saw on my trip. (His wife Deb Fallows wrote Dreaming in Chinese, which I'd also recommend.)
For companies in New York, I do have a fuller presentation about my China trip and some conclusions about how to stay competitive (and co-operative!) as China continues to grow. Drop a line.
Finally, we're continuing to explore China business issues in The Councils, which is open (and free!) to online execs at customer-facing companies worldwide. You can apply for membership.