Bing is the biggest rival of Google
- 28
- Sep
During the week I RT a friend, who tweeted an interview to Eric Schmidt, who is the CEO of Google. After I watched it I though two things about the interview. First of all, the importance of recognize a competitor. Schmidt said that Bing is going directly to Google´s core business, which is offer effective and highly relevant advertising. However, Apple and Facebook are long term threats.
Bing is a well run, highly competitive search engine. Meanwhile, it’s “too early to tell,” how big a competitor Facebook will be, he says. Apple is, “the extreme expression of a closed system, but also a partner.
The second part of the interview which called my attention was his promise to be the CEO of Google for 20 years after the company became public.
Hi Seba, I have seen this video a few days ago as well.
My personal opinion is that they might be correct, of course they know their market far better than I do. I say I agree because I would feel terrified by Microsoft as well (People may argue their market politics, and many other practices they have) but.. They have something I ADMIRE, and it is that they are not afraid about failing, I always tell this to the people that work in my company… Microsoft fails everyday, you should just see how many versions and patches they release after they launch a new product, but they are the hell in creating new stuff and they do not stop until they get it right. However, let me point out that I should not benchmark a direct competitor…
Why? simply because if I benchmark an industry leader (in the industry I work), I will be doing a similar or the same exact thing than the actual leader does… So I won’t innovate or create a new market at all, it beats me when IBM benchmarks HP, or GM Benchmarks Honda or Wall Mart benchmarks Carrefour I would pay attention to complete different industries, and companies that work actually in the opposite way, if I am a price leader, I would look up for exclusive companies and the other way around. Many B-I-G companies usually fail when they pick a company to benchmark..for example, many years ago, IBM was terrified by a japanese company -Fujitsu!!- and did not pay attention to upstarts like Apple, like Microsoft, etc.. so, I think Google should have a look around (they are probably doing). Bing is their most near threat, but.. I will look for long time competitors, not only Apple and Facebook.
Anyway, I DO admire Google as well, I have just seen this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXHHkROejik talking about their innovative products and just fascinated me.
I will write about it soon in my webpage.
Regards!
Darío.
Hi Dario, great comment, thanks for stopped here. There is a book called Narrow Your Focus, Dominate Your Market by Michael Treacy, who explains that there are three different ways of ‘value discipline’ that successful companies can adopt to command leadership in their markets:
1) operational excellence – customer proposition is simple: low or lowest price and hassle – free service, such as Fedex Wal-Mart or McDonalds
2) product leadership - offer products that push performance boundaries, such us Apple, Intel, Nike or 3 M
3) customer intimacy -delivering what specific customers want such us IBM, Airborne Express or Nordstrom
You can find online different exercises to see how your company leads. Cheers,