If you were Microsoft, who would you be afraid of right now: Google or Yahoo. Given that Yahoo can barely find its ass with two hands, and Google owns half of the planet, just promised a rival operating system, and is attacking MSFT market share in a hundred markets, I am going to have to go with Google. Long time friend professional competitor Erick Schonfeld has just written up a whole piece on why MSFT is on the hunt against Yahoo. You can read it here.
He even came up with a catchy little image for it. Cute. His basic analysis is that as Bing cannot unseat Google search for a long time, it is instead focusing on Yahoo search, either to soften it for an acquisition or to take the number two search spot. Make no mistake, Microsoft wants that number two search ranking, but it has much, much larger goals. Bing is not part of plan to take over Yahoo, but to reassert Microsoft dominance in the world of technology.
Look at it product by product: Bing for Google, Zune HD for iPod, Win7 for Snow Leopard, Office 2010 for Open Office, Office 2010 for GDocs, etc. Except in mobile phones and email Microsoft is reinventing itself to regain its former top dog status across the world of technology. To say that Bing has anything more than a passing goal at Yahoo market share is to miss the point: Microsoft is out for blood, and you had best watch out.
And good for Microsoft, the Vista malaise seems to have left the company, and it has geared for war. Not a skirmish here or there, but a Sarah Palin “full court press,” but with knives. Bing says one thing to the world of technology: “we are still here, we are bigger than you, have more money, and can innovate like we could when we had seven employees.” Watch out, Google.
