Bing’s Real Problem

Matt Yglesias, on Microsoft’s “Scroogled” anti-Google ad campaign:

The problem with Microsoft’s online service offerings isn’t that their TV campaigns are lame. It’s not even that the products are bad. But they’re not wildly better than Google’s search and email and so forth. Most people are just incredibly lazy. It’s easy to forget, but it took Google Search and Gmail a remarkably long time to rise to dominance during a period when they wiped the floor with the competition on the merits. Now Google has that change-aversion and laziness working in its favor. To beat them, you have to crush them on quality. And Microsoft’s not doing that. No ad campaign can overcome the basic reality of human inertia.

That’s the core problem with a lot of Microsoft’s products, like Windows Phone and Surface. They’re good products, but there’s no holy shit! in them. When you’re an upstart in any market, you need a disruptive product. That’s what happened with the iPhone and iPad for Apple, and with web search and Gmail for Google.

★ Monday, 18 February 2013