Don’t Bing me!

Dear Steve (Ballmer, that is),

I have a problem with something you said yesterday. It was a statement both true and misleading, and one that for some irrational reason managed to upset me as I was reading my daily dose of tech news. During CES, you made a great dig at Google, saying that Microsoft’s intent with Bing is “… not just trying to provide people with a list of links; we want to understand user intent and anticipate what users are really looking for.” That sounds good, until you really think about it. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, so I put it to you thusly: Microsoft, as a company, is famously bad at anticipating what users want. History is littered with examples, and Bing, unless you have some serious magic acts stored away, seems likely to follow that path.

To understand where we are today, it might be helpful to take a look back. In the past, Microsoft has often delivered software that aims to understand what users want to do before they themselves are even aware. Examples:

• The Office Assistant. This one almost speaks for itself. The product was so famously bad, irritating, and intensely unhelpful that users created the “Clippy Must Die” movement (Google it – more than 3,500 results). Microsoft’s own marketing campaigns have included the death of Clippy! The intro video for Office 2010 includes a special agent standing over a grave marker with the name Clippy and a date of death in 2007 (acknowledging that MS killed off the Assistant feature in Office 2007).
• Microsoft Bob. Where to begin with this travesty of interface design? Bob was a stab at a new interface paradigm, designed to deliver a UI that simplified the use experience for novice computer users. Users navigated their computer as virtual rooms, with study for writing letters or library for reading books or game room…you get the idea. The sad irony is that the interface was too limiting even for those who had no idea how to use a computer, was too irritating to use for more than a short period of time, and as a product, Bob was quickly killed off (though the interactive animated assistants from Bob were reincarnated as the Office Assistant).

Given this history of failure to interpret user’s wishes, the approach you are advocating with Bing seems destined to fail. Why do you assume users are not smart enough to search for what they need? Why do you think Google has made it to the top search engine? Could it be because they are meeting the needs of consumers? To put this to the test, I conducted a simple test pitting Bing against Google for some head-to-head searches. I searched for Microsoft Courier and Apple Tablet on both sites. For the Courier query, both Bing and Google provided salient results, including the Gizmodo link about the original leaked video and more recent news articles from CES regarding the HP tablet launch. Unfortunately, when I searched for Apple Tablet, Bing…well it did not fare as well. Google gave me several salient results regarding iSlate rumors and CES-related news, but Bing gave me a mix of tablet rumors and shopping results for “Apple Table.” And while a fruit-shaped table might be quite fetching in a kindergarten classroom, it was not the object of my search.

Google’s recent inclusion of latest results from Twitter and other constantly-updated sources makes a great deal of sense. If you were to look at the way people use Google, you would see that it often serves as a portal to current events and memes. People want news related to a celebrity scandal or major event like a terrorist threat. As a feature, this makes sense. You should look at what your users really want, rather than following the path of history and giving them technology that tries to guess their intent. Bing’s guiding principle, to anticipate what users are looking for, seems to be a solution in search of a problem. You may have a great product for some niche market, such as travel or complex and ambiguous search needs like legal research. Typing in a destination and seeing airfares and hotel prices/packages is great, but it’s something increasingly being done on travel websites which users are already comfortable using.

I put it to you this way Steve: I know what I want to do. When I google something, I have a pretty good idea how to find what I need. Build tools that help me do that better, rather than tools that try to tell me what I want to do. I want Apple Tablet rumors, not fruit-shaped furniture. I’ll thank you to Bing someone else, and for the time being, I’m quite happy to continue googling.

Yours,
~Aaron Kraus