I’ve recently switched over from Google to Bing.  As far as I can see, it has generally given me just as good a result as I get from Google.  I know, I know… ‘But It’s Not Google’! My reason is pretty simple:  Google makes too much money.  I once knew a guy who would drive across town to save a penny on a gallon of gasoline.  His opinion was that it was our duty to ‘keep stores honest’.  There was no ‘location, location, location’ in his world.  Odd, maybe.  Shrewd, perhaps.  But it’s an awful lot easier to switch search engines than it is to drive across town to get your gas.

How can you tell when a company is making too much money?  Well, when they start to drift too far outside of their sphere of competency.  Should Google be developing a substitute for MS Office?  You could make that argument.  Should they be developing a cell phone operating system? This seems a little bit of a stretch when their stated mission used to be to ‘Organize the World’s Information’, not ‘Operate the World’s Gadgets’.  They now are ‘Search, Ads and Apps’.  Ok, but is alternative energy an ‘app’?  Is it good PR?  Or is it a company reading too much of their own press and thinking that because they’ve developed an awesome IT technology and a great business model that generates cash then they must be smart in everything else?  This is where companies typically begin to unwind.  They make an extraordinary profit because we allow them to.  We pay for this profit out of the products we buy from companies that have no alternative but to place ads on Google.  And they are throwing our money at a wide range of products and initiatives, none of which even appear to be close to commercial viability.

More worrisome is the now seemingly Orwellian ‘Don’t Be Evil’.  Maybe we don’t really want one company to ‘Organize the World’s Information’ after all.

So why the push toward Bing?  It’s the first seemingly viable alternative to Google.  Microsoft’s search share growth may be less about technology and more about strong marketing and lucky timing.  What it does for us as marketers (and our customers as shrewd allocators of their marketing dollars) is to force Google to focus on competing for our ad dollars a bit harder.  They make so much money because there has been little alternative for too long.  Spreading our attention around will reduce their margins, increase their attention on their core profitable product and reign in the engineers who are seemingly free to wander around a good bit of the time looking for something that can be marketed, so far successfully developing and launching great new products.

When Google leaves the alternative energy business, one which I will be the first to argue is vital, and core to what many of our clients are trying to do, it will create investment room for people who actually know what they are doing and we will have done our job viewing ‘consuming as a political act’.

Galen Dow- President & Founder