So, I went for another meet the team ride with Union Bay Cycling, In the pouring rain… fun. Invariably, while talking with the riders, the topic came up as to what I do for a living. I mentioned I work for Microsoft’s search group — in particular, the new Search Labs group. One of the other riders asked if this was just a matter of marketing our product better… to which I replied that no, we actually have to make a better product. He then asked if the new stuff would be off MSN or something else… I mentioned it was Live.com. He hasn’t heard of it yet.
What’s the point? Well, a number of people out there believe that Microsoft will win because we’ll link in search throughout the operating system (Vista) and IE, and as people adopt Vista / IE7+ over the next 1-5 years, people will accept live.com as the new default.
Except that it won’t happen that way.
Sure, there will be some people who use live.com because it’s the default, just as some people use msn.com now, or people use Google because it’s the default on Firefox. But Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo are all busy trying to change the defaults and hook into the APIs of IE and Vista. And with 1-3 year ship cycles for IE / Windows, there will be ample time to change the defaults. Best of all, OEMs like Dell and HP are going to charge Google / Yahoo to change the defaults — which of course means that Google and Yahoo will pony up the dough to do that.
But fundamentally, “winning by default” isn’t a way to win. In fact, it’s a great way to lose — you need to have a winning product in a marketplace, you need to have something that brings people to it. Hoping people will use your product if there’s a superior one out there just because you’re the “default” is just delusional. And people will use a superior product — just look at the rise of market share of Firefox over IE, the “default.”
No, this is going to be a long, drawn-out competition. It took Google about 3-4 years, from 1998 to about 2001/2, to dethrone AltaVista. And in truth, what really helped was the ton of people that came online and picked Google — AltaVista didn’t so much lose people to Google as a lot more people picked Google than AltaVista when they came online. So, you can imagine how long it’ll take us to get Live to that level. Plus, it has to be better, so it’s a stand-up fight. Our smart people vs Google’s smart people. Live.com is just a start, and has tons of stuff coming out… so keep watch.
And it starts with one rider at a time.