Two Bing atrocities revealed today:
- “Bing Cashback” can actually hike the price of products for three months if you click through.
- Bing is approaching companies (like News Corp.) about “Bing exclusivity”, meaning that they’d block Google and others.
This is the kind of vintage Microsoft market strong-arming that makes me both sick and bewildered. Are they really this desperate to take over a market just because it involves money and there’s someone else in it with stature? Do they really think it’s okay, market-wise, to be a complete dick? (Yeah, yeah, iPhone apps, but at least there’s a good, well-produced product with interesting technology. Bing’s just sad.) Don’t they think this is both completely transparent and will catch up with them?
If anyone can think of a compelling reason to use Bing besides “I work at Microsoft and I am concerned for the health of the office furniture“, I’d sure like to hear it.
Political news are important but reader won’t pay for it and I doubt ads works well for that kind of content. Making Google or Bing, which depends on it, pay for it seems actually good to me.
By Damien · 2009.11.24 03:16
If they finance one site, wouldn’t they at some point be saying “this is our fault; we should be paying for all sites”? I don’t want to live in that world either.
It’s stupid of News Corp to agree to this in the first place, and they’ll definitely sink their own ship by opting out of Google. However, it’s evil of Bing to suggest it.
By Jesper · 2009.11.24 07:36
I can sort of see where they’re going with this – if we look at Google’s profits, they’re extracting a lot of money out of the digital content economy.
Now theoretically that should mean room for someone else to come in and undercut Google, taking a lower margin.
But the problem is that without content exclusivity, or any reason for users not to go with Google, that is pretty much impossible to do.
So I can see why Microsoft/Bing are trying this. They can’t simply offer a better cut of advertising revenue, or a lower search-click cost, because the level of traffic is pretty much irrelevant – and crucially, it doesn’t improve anything for the end user.
(Unlike, say, Facebook, who have created a walled garden of ad-revenue by solving a need for a new Geocities)
By JulesLt · 2009.11.24 21:06
To be fair to Bing, the negative cashback thing wasn’t them. As far as I can tell, it was a vendor supplying inflated data.
I’m not keen on the whole exclusivity thing though. To be honest, I can’t see it working. They won’t be able to get exclusive rights to every major news source out there, will they? So won’t people who use Google (etc) just read their news somewhere that isn’t Bing exclusive?
By Olly · 2009.11.25 15:45
Olly: exactly. It won’t work, but their arrogance in even trying is despicable.
By Jesper · 2009.11.25 18:27