Is Bing the next big thing?

May 28, 2009 may end up being an historic day in the life of the Internet.

Two products were released last Thursday. The first, Google Wave, is not quite out of the lab yet but could change the face of the Internet. The other, Microsoft’s Bing search engine, is ready to try to be a giant killer.

Either one could turn the world of the Web upside down.

And it’s not hard for me to expect that it’ll be Google.

Microsoft has found itself in such a strange position these last few years, getting battered on two sides, by Google and its dominance of the search world and Apple and its dominance of the hipster-world of well-designed hardware.

Bill Gates may be one of the richest people on the planet, but his company can’t catch a break. It’s tried and epically failed to knock off its competitors (the Mircosoft Zune, anyone?) but still manages to look like a lumbering, clueless giant, only good for blue screen of death and bad hardware.

With Bing, Microsoft has once again tried to enter the search game and knock off Google’s huge market share. But what I think Bing misses is that search, itself, is changing.

While I may be among the narrow niche of Web users in our fair state (See here), since I use Google’s Chrome browser and am on the Internet for about 18 hours a day, I can’t remember the last time I went to Google’s actual search page. With Chrome and Firefox, you can just search from your browser’s address bar. In Chrome, the specific site you are looking for usually pops right up, eliminating the middle man.


Bing claims to be a Google tamer, but how exactly it’s going to do that is still a little fuzzy. Its results are still very similar (if not identical) to what you would get from Microsoft’s Live.com search a few weeks ago. Its splash page looks nice and has some great photos, and there are some related searches, and sub-dividing of results, but nothing that blows the doors off Google.

Perhaps Bing has some killer app out there, but Google continues to improve and tweak its dominant search engine, so why should anyone move away from that if they really want to find something they want online.

Google is, after all, an innovation machine. It’s not just search that Microsoft has to compete with, but Maps, Gmail, Docs and all of the other applications that have become S.O.P. for the Web savvy.

Which brings me to Google Wave: Google Wave also debuted Thursday as part of Google’s big I/O conference. I’m sure the timing coinciding with Bing was no coincidence, but no matter what day it was unveiled, Wave would have been the Next Big Thing.

Wave is hard to describe – it’s a cooperative communications tools which has features like a Wiki, an e-mail service and Twitter all rolled into one. You can embed it, work through the threads and share your work, photos and whatnot by dragging and dropping them into a conversation. It’s hard to describe, but equal parts Twitter, e-mail and awesome. More on Wave here.

As a leader in its business, Google has the luxury of innovation. But the company also knows that the Web is changing so quickly that only innovation – and not imitation – will keep it on top of its game.

So, unlike Microsoft, Google’s big announcement last week was not about a desperate lunge at a slice of the consumer pie, but a move into the next step of evolving communication on the Web.

It seems like history is more likely to reward that move, than the other.