Whit Andrews

Yahoo pre-dated launches. There was a moment when they asked the question “Do You Yahoo?” I remember that. It was verbishly precious, and it never took off. (Wonder if that sort of thing ever will? If only one needed “to Gartner” things. Wonder if any company name will ever be a verb.) Lycos was, hmmm — I think when Lycos launched, it was www.lycos.cmu.edu — I’m getting old; I can’t remember the URLs any more. Alta Vista, yeah, there was the blimp? But that was AFTER, when things were kind of getting strange in terms of what Alta Vista was really supposed to do for DEC, or Compaq, or the VC firm that picked it up after.

At the risk of being obnoxious (a risk I cheerfully take daily) I have to point something out: One of Microsoft’s long-standing challenges in this market has been its need to convince us, to evangelize us, to tell us that what it’s doing really matters. I know that CEO Steve Ballmer announced Bing this morning at D7 (I can’t get into the servers to watch the video, natch), and I saw on the Live blog via an old friend’s tweet that Bing was announced to be on the street soon. There’s a company video. (There’s always a company video now, have you noticed? Yeesh. I should cover video. Oh, wait, I do.)

As a result, what Microsoft does is erect a straw man for everyone to stare at skeptically. The first piece of research with any length that I wrote for Gartner in 2000 was on MSN; we still provide it on Gartner.com with the achingly accurate statement “This research is provided for historical perspective; portions of this document may not reflect current conditions.” True ’nuff: For example, Microsoft seems to have pretty definitively licked that whole anti-trust thing. I guess it’s probably too late to spin Carpoint or MoneyCentral out as separate companies. Zoinks!

For example, there’s gonna be a Bing truck, I guess. (I’d put that image in this blog, but the photographer marked it “all rights reserved,” so you have to click to get there. Intellectual property: Live by the restriction; die by the restriction. I don’t like it when people steal my research, so I won’t pinch his picture.) Google did not have a truck. Google had a stellar service that everybody used (me included, although well after everyone else did, because I don’t deal well with change and I had learned that whole Alta Vista +/- thing and was pretty sure Google was a fad), not a truck, and not a Big Launch at a sold-out conference, and not a video to show you how it worked.

It seems so obvious to me: Microsoft would excel, not through a Big Launch — it didn’t work for Cuil, and not for Wolfram Alpha, and not for Grokker — but through simple, quiet excellence. (Gosh, why aren’t those other search sites linked? How might you find them, do you suppose?) Microsoft needs to build something in this market that is so good that people just start using it. And then getting other people to use it.

If Microsoft wants to excel in this market, then there are two things they need to do, in reverse order:

1. Build a great vehicle for delivering advertising.

2. Convince through proper suasion a substantial clientele to adopt something that I suppose might be Bing — but not necessarily abandon Google in the process!

I will leave to my esteemed colleagues Andrew Frank, Allen Weiner (he’s got an opinion already, go Allen), and the like the question of whether Microsoft can defeat Google. I will say, though, that if I were Microsoft, I would say that having failed to defeat Lycos, AOL (gonna be back solo soon, I hear), Alta Vista, and Google, it seems clear to me that their greatest opportunity is NOT to battle Google but to create something different and just as good.

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