Why Bing is not the Wave of the future
Published: 01 Jun 2009 17:47 BST
On Thursday, within minutes of each other, Microsoft and Google made hugely important announcements. Microsoft launched its rebranded, retooled search engine, inexplicably called Bing, and Google unveiled the no less strangely named Wave.
Bing is more immediately important to Microsoft than Wave is to Google, but Wave has industry-changing potential. Bing is a competent search engine that looks like Google search. Wave is an experiment in merging identity, data and messaging that looks like nothing on Earth.
Assessing Bing is easy: test it against Google search and see which is better. Assessing Wave is going to take years. Bing may be very good and Wave may be a bust, but the excitement is all Wave's.
That may seem unfair to Microsoft: it's easy to explain. Wave is pointing to the future, Bing to the past.
Why no Wave from Microsoft? It has the resources and should have the motivation, but it lacks the ability. With the huge power of being the entrenched incumbent comes ironic impotence: changing the status quo is all risk, no reward. Google can create a brand new way of communicating online, reinventing merrily as it goes, because it wins when people do more online. Microsoft only wins when people do more with Microsoft software within the existing Microsoft licensing model: any small team of employees building a substantially open-source project with tectonic potential would last around two microseconds in the company.
The company would far rather burn billions in me-too consumer, online and mobile markets than invest them back in the core cash cow of corporate computing, where they'd be in danger of actually changing something.
It's the classic innovator's dilemma, with added anti-vim from Microsoft's corporate culture. Microsoft talks of innovation, and it invests in research, but it defaults to stasis and duplication.
Once upon a time, there was talk of breaking Microsoft up for antitrust reasons. That would have been very painful, but it could have given parts of the company the freedom and impetus to renew themselves. Those attributes are lacking now — without them, Microsoft is not Waving, but drowning.
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