Could Bing beat Google
As my first article, I wanted to start with a sounded clash, so I decided to go with a major business strategy idea. Attacking Google at its own game.
Lets put some perspective into these giants. In 2019 Google made S161.85 Billon of which $134.81 came from advertising, this means 70.9% of its revenue comes from advertising. On the other hand, Microsoft merely achieved 7.63 billons in advertising revenue in 2019. This shouldn't sound as surprising for anyone in marketing as anyone who does SEM knows what bings represent and how bad is it.
Microsoft has done a couple of things really well but this is like cooking a great meal and forgetting to add salt, all their efforts haven't been good enough.
The new Microsoft Edge has been a great step forward as Microsoft slowly increases user base of its browser. This is due to fact that they have a great product, its fast, and allows you to do a lot of things, yet is far from chrome which has more than 70% of users base.
Why would you use Bing?
I can't actually understand why would you use it, everytime I give it a go its results are appalling, it seems I speak Russian and Bing speaks Portuguese, most results are not what I would expect. I could put examples here on which are the results you get using one or the other but is as easy as opening 2 tabs on your browser, one on google the other on Bing and just type the same thing.
Is it really that complicated to create a search algorithm that works? is that difficult to gather a team of scientist specialized in human behavior and a couple of engineers to decode how Google's search engine works how it finds something relevant to what we type?. This should be the starting point, of course, Microsoft needs a relevant search engine, it has the browser, now it needs its search engine to work, it doesn't need to have the most precise search engine but something a lot better and it can only be achieved with science.
Changing to Bing?
With a good search engine Microsoft would have a fighting chance, but how could Microsoft lure people to use Bing, or better, how would I make Bing the new thing.
1) The Bing App
Bing should be an app itself and Edge should be part of it, as Office that is a suite of different apps you would need to create a suite that would have different tools (dashboard, search engine, docs, facebook, etc, etc) integrating apps would be essential to create a hub of solutions. Microsoft has done a great job with Power Bi, it gave a free tool, and build a community around it, now is the reference tool used in Business intelligence (Not to mention that it is also great to plug with Ms Dynamics).
2) Buying someone strategic:
Imagine Microsoft goes on a buying spree and buys Time Warner its market cap is $74 billion. In Nov 2019 Microsoft was sitting on $136.6 Billion for acquisitions, and although this move would be seen as really risky it would make a lot of sense.
Now with Time Warner under its belt Microsoft could add to its Bing App HBO. Now imagine that you have HBO content for free with the only requirement to use Bing app, I mean Microsoft owns windows and certainly knows what you do on your computer and how much time you spend on what programs and what do you use, now imagine that Bing Works and you are happy to use it!!. If Bing was working the lost revenue of HBO, could bring Microsoft a huge revenue on advertising, not to mention that if you add some advertising to HBO (like youtube), you would probably end making a good profit on advertising in this channel also.
Of course, there would be other challenges like mobile and tv boxes with android but something like this well done would probably make Microsoft advertising revenue skyrocket. Not to mention recovering their Time warner investment in a few years.
As I sad key is to develop an algorithm that works without it, you'll be trying to run a race with a Ferrari driven by a blind person against Fernando Alonso.
Renault and its new CEO Luca de Meo my next target :-)