Bing is Prince

Unlike a lot of engineers in my company who swear by Firefox, Google and Apple I have a lot of respect for Microsoft. Google is my default search choice, I own an Apple iPhone and an iMac but I am also on Windows 7 and IE8. Infact I am the guy who forces the engineers in our company (much to their annoyance) to ensure that all our Products work on IE really well.

If you are a business person you cant but not respect a company which has dominated the world of computing ever since I was exposed to it. So after not such a great experience with Live (I must be the only guy in India with a personal page on live.com) I was shocked and awed by Bing.

Bing is good looking, refreshing, fast, clutter free and interesting. The video and image search is great.The dynamic clusters, related searches and short summaries on mouseover help you save time and actually encourage you to search and explore more. The results are not bad either. On User Experience Bing is a big move forward.

Does this mean that Microsoft will now gain share in Search ? From Google or Yahoo ? Is Bing the Xbox of Search ? Microsoft has a history of not giving up. They have great technology in almost all areas of computer science in their labs. They have talented people and they have done it before. Will Microsoft be able to divert high quality resources to Search and the Web and fend off the threat from Google and Apple to its core platform and apps business ? After all these companies now have Market Caps which rival Microsoft's unlike the smaller competitors which Microsoft has crushed in the past.

I am going to stick my neck out and say we have a fight on our hands. Search will now see innovation like never before and not just in areas like Relevance. Bing needs distribution and a large advertising network along with Branding to be a serious challenger. The ad campaign will help with the Branding bit. Yahoo could provide the distribution and scale on the advertising side. If Bing succeeds a deal with Yahoo may be imminent.