Is aggressive marketing and technological firepower enough to dethrone a market leader and alter the habits and inclinations of millions?
This is the problem that Microsoft have faced since the launch and promotion of its Bing search engine and while Bing has made some progress in clawing back a little of the market share from its competitors it is still a long way off become a real contender to Google’s crown.
At a recent panel discussion at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco senior Vice President of Microsoft’s Online Audience Business, Yusuf Medhi admitted that his company has, “a long ways to go in terms of what we want to accomplish.”
Google’s position as, essentially what is for many, a default search page has a significant effect upon the way people search the internet and Medhi admitted that it would be extremely challenging for Microsoft to turn the heads of users who utilize the service so frequently, a habit ingrained upon the social consciousness, even the term ‘to Google’ is now a verb recognised in the English Dictionary. Medhi stated that, “It’s a hard thing. Habits die hard,” but he and the rest of Microsoft will certainly hoping that they don’t die too hard as they look to increase Bing’s market share.
In September in the U.S, Google handled 66.1 percent of search queries as opposed to 16.7 for Yahoo and 11.2 for Bing. Microsoft’s search partnership with is being established globally to assert Bing as the back end search engine for yahoo sites.
Although these statistics may sound healthy for Google, the U.S market share is relatively competitive compared to UK data which shows that over 91 percent of all searches go through either google.co.uk or google.com.
Medhi stated that Bing’s offline and online marketing campaign has been geared towards highlighting the system’s capabilities to perform tasks or collect information within the framework of the Bing interface.
Google’s Nikesh Arora, President of Global Sales Operations and Business Development, sat a matter of feet away from Medhi at the same conference seemed to set Google’s targets squarely on developing the company’s capacity for display advertising. Not known traditionally as a significant display advertisement provider Google has been busy working on its technologies to simplify the process of devising display ad campaigns as well as buying up advertising space on thousands of sites.
This confrontation is only one part of the increasing war between Microsoft and Google which has recently seen Facebook brought into the fray. In alliance with Microsoft, Facebook’s impending message platform which, despite Mark Zuckerberg’s protestations, is set to challenge Gmail as one of the major online communication networks will also have Facebook Docs fully integrated into the system. Facebook docs represented the first ever opportunity for users to use a web browser to access Microsoft’s Office Web Apps. As what looks to be a direct challenge to Google Docs the tussle between these two titans looks set to go on for a long while to come.