It’s a simple question really. But there’s a big difference in context. In the 1980s Microsoft was collaborating with IBM to jointly build OS/2 which intended to be the future of the PC. At some point down the road Microsoft realized that it didn’t really need IBM and it had no intention of becoming part of IBM’s business model. IBM was expecting OS/2 to become a complement to all the other IBM operating systems. By the time that Microsoft said farewell to OS/2, IBM was starting to flounder in the PC market. It had lost the plot. Nevertheless it kept going with OS/2 and even spent considerable dollars on promoting the doomed Warp edition of the software.

Bing

So fast forward about 15 years and we see a similar scenario. The protagonists this time are Microsoft (the giant) and Google, (the upstart.) Google is strangling Microsoft’s money-losing search business and Microsoft is now valiantly making a full frontal attack on Google with its new search site (opening June 3rd) called Bing.  There’s a $100 million ad campaign that’s going to support it and attempt to drive traffic.

Let’s look at this bit by bit:

• Bing: This is a really good name for a web site. Microsoft seemed to have mislaid the marketing savvy it once had, but there’s no denying this is a very good brand name – and brand names matter in the search business. If you can’t even remember the name of a search site it’s over. Microsoft is even talking in terms of Bing becoming a word like “Google” did, but that’s beyond dreaming, it’s delusional. A xerox is still a xerox despite the success of Canon and Ricoh. A hoover is still a hoover despite Dyson’s success.
• A Cleaner Interface: Google has been gradually compromising its interface and search results for the sake of revenue for quite a while now.
• Capability: We’ll all discover what Microsoft has up its sleeve soon enough, but the capability that it is currently headlining, ahead of the launch, is that it will do much better on subsetting (breaking down results into groups to help you in the next step of your search) and I suspect it will. Any capability in this area is likely to be an improvement over Google. Microsoft is about to learn that an improvement over Google doesn’t matter a damn because if it shows any sign of making a difference Google will copy whatever Microsoft has done. It needn’t even be in a hurry. OS/2 had capabilities that Windows never had for years but it made no difference. The simple fact is that there’s no killer functionality that anyone can add to search – just marginal improvement on Google.
• BING: Bing Is Not Google. Some wag has already suggested that Bing stands for But It’s Not Google. And that’s the real problem that Microsoft faces. There are thousands of people that could switch to Open Office from Microsoft Office at almost no pain to themselves, because the interface is so similar,  and they’d pay nothing for the switch, but few did, because it wasn’t Office. It may have walked like a duck and squawked like a duck, but it was just a goose with laryngitis. If Bing starts out better than Google and even remains better than Google for several years, it’s too late. When IBM finally realized it had to stop Microsoft, it was already too late. The same looks to be true of Google. It’s not the search engine anymore, it’s the fact that people are just too hooked in to Google to change. Like me, with iGoogle, Gmail, Google Voice, Google Maps and Google Apps. They walk in lockstep with the Search, just like Word and Excel and Powerpoint walked in lockstep.

If you haven’t yet done so, you can take a look at a Bing video to get an impression of the site, but you only have to wait a few days before it’s available. In fact it may already be available as you read this. I will be using it. Just as I used WolframAlpha for a week. Wolfram Alpha, by the way, never even got traffic as high as Ask.com – but it’s in a different market (see Will WolframAlpha challenge Google?) It’s hard to know yet how big that market is and whether Wolfram Alpha is a permanent significant fixture on the web. Bing will start out with a jump in traffic from those, like me, who like to try new things. While the ad campaign runs it will probably do well too. But after that it’s hard to see it keeping whatever traffic it wins. It will be too hard for most people to kick the Google habit, even if it’s worth kicking.

Bing looks like it could be Microsoft’s OS/2.