The presentation event convened by Google on Wednesday the 8th as a supposed quick reaction to the presentation of Microsoft’s ” new Bing ” with built-in ChatGPT was a complete failure that not only left everyone who followed it cold but even gave rise to a fall of almost 10% in the price of the company’s shares.
What did Google:
do so wrong in its presentation? Simply allowing what is going on in the company to be conveyed from her: that they have had to put together a full-speed, pinned presentation, in which they have said, in practice, less than in the note on the corporate blog from the previous day, in which, moreover, they limited themselves to making ads without offering any specific product for evaluation, and in which they even offered a search with a rather questionable result.
It is the worst-case scenario: you summon everyone to not say anything new, and on top of that, one of your examples turns out to be very debatable, that is something that reveals haste and lack of planning. If the presentation of Microsoft’s new Bing led to an increase of around 5% in the company’s share price, Google’s generated a drop of almost 10%, and what is worse a total impression. of having caught them completely asleep at the wheel. If the headlines with which the press received the Microsoft event were of the type ” search will never be the same again “, ” competition with Google heats up “, ” Bing makes search interesting again ” or ” Microsoft challenges Google“, the ones Google generated with theirs were more like ” they’re still several weeks away from Microsoft .”
The impressions,
the headlines and the stock market are not always an accurate reflection of reality: deep down, Google has been considering machine learning for many years as a strategic technology for its business, while Microsoft, apparently, almost gambles on it. all to an alliance with an OpenAI that at the time they captured thanks to letting it use Azure. But in practice, things are not black or white: neither Microsoft is completely ignorant that can’t do anything without incorporating OpenAI technology, nor Google, which boasted of having trained all levels of the company in machine learning, has shown to be prepared to react in time. FromAt the beginning of January, we all know that Microsoft was going to incorporate OpenAI technology, the company has not been especially secret or discreet in that regard, and the reality is that everything that Google has been able to organize in several weeks has been a bad presentation. in which it has not even been able to launch any product as such.
A clear problem:
the industry leader, pressured by the possible consequences of a change, is not capable of considering how to deal with it in an agile way. For Microsoft, the change represents a huge opportunity for improvement in an environment, that of search, in which its participation was very limited and with the possibility of injecting new life into areas such as office automation, in which it is a leader. For Google, the change is a problem that leads it to question everything from its cost structure to its business model. or the very same SEO.
For Google, this change is a minefield: aside from the not-so-obvious question of cost, why are customers paying for search advertising, which accounts for around 58% of the company’s revenue, if A good part of the users will be satisfied with a response in the form of text and, therefore, they will not need to click on anything else? What happens when your clients have spent their entire lives investing in SEO that makes the entire web work to the liking of the Google engine if now the position of a page in the list of results is going to be practically irrelevant, because what account is to leave in the composed answer? How is it possible that Microsoft indicates the sources of information on which your browser has based its answer, but Google, at least apparently, does not?
The general narrative is clear:
Microsoft has been able to overtake Google on the right. The new Bing is there for anyone to evaluate, while Google offers only updated promises. And although for the moment we are only talking about narratives, there is no doubt that, firstly, they are important, and secondly, they show something very clear: that Google has not been able to capitalize on an advantage that they allegedly had, and despite being leaders, they have disappointed their market. And beware, there are still more actors in this theatre.
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