Bing vs. the King of the Trolls

Many readers have long suspected that Robert X. Cringely writes things he knows to be complete and utter bullshit simply to stir the pot. After all, the world is full of technology pundits who try and fail to get it right, so why try to be as blindingly wrong as possible without being too obvious about it? Still, even by Cringely's unusually high standards, his Sunday op-ed in the NYT is so amazingly asinine that even the Times should have known better than to publish it.

I initially LOLd at Bing for the sake of its name if nothing else. Unlike Apple, Microsoft has never really understood the consumer and succeeded primarily by a combination of fortuitous timing and a brilliant, business-centric platform strategy. Save for the XBox, their every attempt at consumer-centric products has ranged from the easily-ignored and tone-deaf (Live.com) to the OMFG-WTF-were-they-thinking (Microsoft Bob). The funny thing, though, is that you can say almost exactly the same about Google.

Like Microsoft, Google got one core thing very very right at the ideal moment in time by dumb luck as much as anything else. From one initial accident, they've created a design mythology around the primacy of minimalism and algorithmic thinking.

Far from fostering innovation, Google's overnight dominance of the search space hit like a nuclear attack, and their perceived omniscience and ability to cash out any company doing something remotely interesting (and intentionally or not, bury it in a dark corner of the Googleplex) has left the entire business looking like a post-apocalyptic wasteland lorded over by a bunch of mercurial engineers. While they have succeeded in scaling out their vast server farms with admirable aplomb, in user experience terms it's really the same damn product it was ten years ago.

What truly surprised me about Bing was how thoroughly satisfying an alternative it is. In side-by-side comparisons the results it yields are (in my discerning judgment) at least as good, the vaunted page-load times just as fast, and unlike Google, it actually feels like there's some real effort to enrich the functionality of search-centric navigation. But the real success, in my book, is that I've found myself, after 10 pages of Google yield nothing, going to Bing to see if I can do better. No alternative search engine has succeeded in getting me to do that more than one or two times before.

Cringely thinks this is some sort of opera bouffe, a day of jousting and feasting to amuse the nobles while the peasants dig potatoes. I see instead the first remotely serious challenge to Google's core--only--franchise in its history. Google has enjoyed almost from its first days an amazing halo of organizational manifest destiny, a sense that this was the only company in the world that had any idea how to do search. I don't know if Bing will deliver the stroke that kills the king, but it is about time somebody gave it a serious try, and even if Microsoft fails, I doubt they will be the last.