
I was wondering last night what I would do if I were Google give the new
MSFT-Yahoo deal.
The first question to probably ask is should Google worry about this in the 1st place? Short answer is Yes. Search is not a very sticky product and anyone with a better product and decent distribution can easily start taking marketshare from the leader. MSFT definitely has the money to pay for distribution and even though Bing's "search quality" is pretty bad (i.e Search results on Bing for most queries is much worse than that of Google's . Good example is the query - "How to do Good Seo" on
Bing vs.
Google ), Bing clearly does a decent job of the UX and latency. They are also doing a FANTASTIC job of marketing to the press and the world in general resulting in largely great coverage for the product. Now with the Yahoo search deal, there is some chance that GOOG might start seeing Bing taking some marketshare.
So what than should Google do? My answer, Google should adopt an extremely aggressive strategy against Microsoft
Innovate more on Search - All said and done. Google's search improvements are subtle and timid at best. It's amazing that Twitter launched real time search before Google did :). Google is hardly in the news for it's innovative search improvements. I would set an aggressive goal of one major improvement per month
Put more resources on Chrome, Promote it more - Chrome is gaining market share but where is the Mac version? Use the Google home page and the search results page to promote Chrome. Every Google page should have a promo for Chrome. Chrome is a good browser so Google should be able use it's massive distribution to market the hell out of this product.
Start taking the fight to Microsoft - The Chrome OS is still vaporware but Google Apps is a real tangible product. Google should spend a lot more time/money/resources getting large companies to adopt Google apps. Get 10% of the Fortune 500 to switch and MSFT is going to really start worrying. Google can actually offer to pay for the cost of switching and deploy IT resources to actually do some of the hard work that IT departments might have to do to switch. Also spend more engineering resources in developing the features these companies want. End of the day MSFT gets a lot of money from these large organizations. If you can cut of some key revenue streams MSFT is going to start to worry.
Develop on OS and open source it ASAP - These things take a long time to happen. This means Chrome OS should be high priority
Advertise - While Google is still very cool to the geeks. The masses don't find it all that cool anymore. It's Facebook, YouTube and Twitter that are the cool kids on the block. Big companies can be cool as well... Apple and Nintendo are good examples. Having an equivalent of a "I am a Mac" campaign won't hurt Google.
Anyways nothing like some good competition to spur some innovation. Let the games begin :))