Watch out Bing … the Wave is coming!
Ok, I’ll be the first to say they’re not the same thing. Microsoft Bing is a new search engine with interactive functionality and Google Wave is described as a replacement technology for email. But, strange coincidence that they were both announced within a day of each other at the end of May. Bing was presented by Steve Balmer to an audience of executives at the SMX Advanced event and the following day, Wave was demonstrated by the charismatic Rasmussen (of Google Maps fame) to a community of 4000 developers at the Google I/O conference.
So, these two giants of technology, who have been looking for ways to eat each others market over the last few years (Google creating apps to rival MS Office and Microsoft attempting Yahoo! takeover for greater web search / advertising presence), decide to innovate and strike a blow to the other company.
Will their new developments succeed? And how do they compare as competitive strategies?
Firstly, credit to Microsoft for walking away from a repentant Yahoo! last year and improving on their own search tool instead. Yahoo! didn’t so much represent better technology, but market share and looked to be a bargain at the time. But market share is finite when web users are becoming more savvy all the time and the real competition comes from innovation and new technology. Bing is not just a search engine, but a ‘decision engine’, providing intelligent results and a rich media experience. Early reports show that Bing has already overtaken Yahoo! as the number 2 search engine of choice.
But for me, Google enters a different league in terms of their insight, innovation, ambition and PR savvy. Wave has been lauded as potentially replacing email and considering email technology has been around since the 1960s, is the defacto standard for digital communication and is recognised in the law courts, this is hugely ambitious. But that’s great! Recognising that new forms of communication from social networking are growing and building them into a new platform that will also handle email-type messages is the next step and Google have stolen a march. Will it take off? We should know more by the end of the year in terms of adoption, but you have to say that getting 4000 developers on board with a top demo, giving them sandbox accounts to play with and opening it up with APIs is a great start.
Of course, if you’re one of the paranoid about Google building tools to gather personal data, then Wave ill only increase your paranoia as it could become the platform for all communication (including social networks) if the apps are right.