I haven’t been blogging as much lately for a variety of reasons… but the biggest is that the Search Wars seem to be, well, over. Certainly Microsoft is still very much agitating about them, and the Yahoo! death watch continues, but… there isn’t anything there that I can see. More to the point, now that I’ve been out for over a year, a few things come to mind:
Awareness
Here’s the biggest problem I see with Microsoft’s search now that I’m not working there and in the middle of things. Most people aren’t aware that they’re an option. People know about Google, they know about Yahoo. They remember MSN, but people don’t equate that with Search, and nobody who isn’t in the industry knows about Live. There’s just zero brand awareness there. And so far, nothing has changed in the past year. Now, I know Microsoft is planning on rebranding and relaunching Live (again) this spring; I suspect we’ll see a big SuperBowl splash to get the word out (hopefully better than last time, which was a lame commercial that was the 2nd in after the half-time show!). But when will they actually be in the game?
A reason to care
I’m tech savvy, and I pay attention to what happens in Web sites. But as a customer and user of search, I’m blissfully unaware of anything that would attract me to use Live. OK, they have an image on www.live.com, and they bought FareCast and are doing this CashBack thing. Um…. OK. Really, that’s it? And I know that just because I’m sorta paying attention. But it seems largely that there’s really no feature additions that would attract new people and generates people talking about them. And it’s not like there aren’t ideas out there. Where’s a People Search? Or how about when I type in “Review D700″ I get, you know, reviews, and not pages trying to sell me the D700 that have a link saying “Review yours here!” Personalization maybe? I mean…. come on Harry and Brian, give me something to talk about!
BRIC
Everyone out there either uses Google, or doesn’t. The above spoke about converting people who use Google to switch. Now, let’s talk about the group that doesn’t use Google. Who and where are these people? Well, most of them are in countries that are rapidly coming online - Brazil, Russia, India, and China, aka BRIC. They don’t use Google because they don’t use anything. Thus, they’ll pick the best when they come online. So where’s the huge international expansion there? Google’s pushing there, and they sort of win by default by just being the dominant player. But Microsoft, which has footprints globally, doesn’t appear to be pushing here at all.
Mobile
This is a tougher one, but strikes me as another miss already. One of the strategies that Microsoft has used is to wait for a major paradigm shift and have the right product at the time, thus winning over converts who make the shift. For example, Office was the paradigm shift that enabled Word and Excel to dominate over WordPerfect and Lotus123 — a single business package that had the major software applications people used and that worked together. What’s the next paradigm shift? Well, I don’t know if it’s a huge shift, but I’d say Mobile is the best bet for one. However, while the Live Search app on Windows Smartphones is pretty nice, it’s really just Live Maps. And turns out Google is better on SmartPhones, at least in my opinion, because it loads faster and runs faster. but the bigger issue here is that nobody uses Windows Mobile… the original iPhone has outsold all Windows Mobile devices ever sold combined. Score another one for Google. Yeah, Google is competing with Apple with the Google Phone, but who cares… Google is still on the dominant player (iPhone), and RIM (BlackBerries) seem to rapidly be losing their luster, even if Microsoft buys them. So…. there anything there?
OK… so there’s my four reasons on why I don’t see much excitement in Search. I wish there was something there. Certainly, a product space is interesting when there’s good competition and good features. Remember the mid-90s? There were a bunch of search engines, and people I knew DID compare one to the other. Certainly there was a lot of, “Oh, I use Lycos / AltaVista / Excite / etc. because it’s better” type comments, but all these guys were still offering new features - like image search when it came out, or stock quotes, or whatnot. Things that made people talk, and want to try out a different engine. That’s what’s missing…. there’s no talk, no reason to try something new. People are becoming set with their tool — and until something changes in a major way, the war is done.
