Why Bing is Genius (and Other Unassailable Truths)

Bing is a search engine that finds and organizes the answers you need so you can make faster, more informed decisions.

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There are very few things in business that remain constant.

Take, for example, our powerful, unassailable, bedrock American companies. Standard Oil had 90% of refinery production circa 1910. A&P, with 16,000 stores and up to 75% share in a number of cities in the 1950s, became the Standard Oil of food retail. GM, boasting 50%+ world domination in the 1960s, became the A&P of automotive. And, of course, Google (at 60%+ search share) is now the GM of search.

See the trend? All unassailable companies. All built to last.

In fact, a paper coming out next month in the California Management Review says that, empirically speaking, few companies make it to their 40^th birthday. That’s equivalent to the 35-year life expectancy of a person in the Middle Ages, which Thomas Hobbes described bluntly as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” (Note to any of my children reading this: That's a person in the Middle Ages, not a middle-aged person. There is a difference.)

So it sure is nice, in the nasty and brutish world of the American corporation--a world that brings unassailable companies to their knees on a regular basis--that we can tie our anchor to a few constants. And, while Google isn’t one of them (I’m afraid, despite our current fascination—see Seth Godin’s dismissal of Bing here), the competitive world order of Michael Porter is.

In Porter’s iconic 1980 Competitive Strategy, the HBS professor gave us three, and only three generic ways to compete: overall cost leadership, differentiation and focus. (As Monty Python said, “Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three.”)

So, this week when Microsoft announced Bing, their newest entry into the search wars, it had to, ipso facto, fit one of those strategies. Or not--in which case it was doomed.

By my reckoning—whether Bing is ultimately a success or not—it fits almost perfectly into Porter’s scheme, and sets up a classic, knock-down-drag-out competitive battle with Google.

It also accomplishes some things vis-à-vis Microsoft’s dance with Yahoo that make Steve Ballmer brilliant.

Though, I might add, brilliance is one of those unassailable qualities of a great CEO, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, I love Bing. More in the next post.

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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