Microsoft Bing marketed to the UK public
By Alexis • Mar 11th, 2010 • Category: Industry News
- Photo: Microsoft
Microsoft has the unenviable task of unseating a company whose name has become a verb. People no longer search for things on the Internet, they google them.
The big search war
- Photo: Google
Given Microsoft and Yahoo have finally concluded their search deal, the search engine market is really a two-horse race: Google vs. Microsoft Bing. To this extent, Bing is throwing a ton of money, millions of pounds in fact, at a television campaign to promote Microsoft’s search engine. With the tagline, ‘Bing and decide’, Microsoft hope to break user’s habits of defaulting to what they know in the interest of trying the unknown, which Microsoft believes is actually superior.
Bit by bit
The disadvantage Microsoft has is this process of trying something new will not be prompted the way the company had to prompt users to try a different web browser with the recent EU-initiated browser lottery. Even then, though, Microsoft Bing has seen its market share in the US inch forward bit by bit with its eighth straight month of growth going from 10.7% to 11.3%. All the while, Google, who are still the undeniable leader in search, had their share drop from 65.7% to 65.4%, indicating Bing is clearly doing something right.
What money cannot buy
- Photo: Microsoft
As the saying goes, money cannot buy everything. It goes a long way in getting one exposure, though. Microsoft Bing has enjoyed much positive sentiment for being semantically different from Google in that it returns a different set of results, while being more aesthetically pleasing than Google’s Spartan approach. The Bing picture of the day has been a major attraction and Microsoft’s fresh outlook on the product is promising.
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO and, by extension, the ultimate overseer of Bing, has said that the company’s strategy was to focus on online services, and no service is more important or lucrative than search.
Tags for this article: Microsoft Bing
