Apart from shoving Bing (previously Live Search) down your throat by having it as a default browser tab in IE 8, Microsoft has got it completely wrong in trying to somehow make you do a bing search by making links on MSN.com as bing search results. This is basically a bong-u from Bing in trying to increase their search count and I recently saw a statistic where they said their bing searches have increased by 3 percent in terms of market share. What I do just to thwart is that I hover over the link to see what the search keywords are and google it - there - I added a search to the Google count. As much as it sounds silly - this not too subtle (rather, showing down your throat) approach of Microsoft is going to rant the people. Those who were already anti-Microsoft are going to run like crazy to Google. I guess that Microsoft and subtlety cannot be in the same sentence unless there is a negating term present.
P.S: While playing gilli cricket - there used to be this older guy who will willingly play himself in the weaker team (or the team with lesser number of makkal) and take a double gaaji - this is exactly what Microsoft is doing.
5 comments:
Bing gets most of its traffic from MSN. So if at all MSFT can advertise this product anywhere, it is in the MSN page.
Market leaders can be subtle about their marketing. But not others. Remember apple, iphone ads? Android ads needlessly asking people to search from the phone?
When you have a very good first choice, people never look for an alternative. Such right on your face ads are the only way to go ... they either work or back fire.
But 3 weeks after release, it still seems to have some kind of momentum going with it. So not bad.
-Prabhu
@ Prabhu,
Then should I look at those statistics which says that the number of searches on Bing has gone up (the stats) with a huge chunk of salt?
No - Comscore, an independent net stat company comes up with these scores. Not google not Microsoft.
All that link does is encourage people to use a search engine that they probably havent heard before. There is nothing wrong with it ...
Go to youtube.com and google.com and check the places where they "encourage" you to download chrome. Same thing with Quicktime.
-Prabhu
Ah, this explains it. I was scratching my head as to how microsoft product would gain marketshare quickly "on its own" on its first try because of quality etc. I mean have pigs started to fly? I guess it really is not "on its own".
> Those who were already anti-
> Microsoft are going to run like
> crazy to Google.
Why would those guys be visiting msn.com in the first place :)?
Arun
mebbe next time u can post from a mebbe an apple or ubuntu....
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