Keeping an eye on the competition is one thing, but when you read about a company explicitly holding meetings designed to make another look bad you have to wonder where its priorities lie.
(Not so) secret “Screw Google” meetings have been a weekly affair at Microsoft, it seems, with the Redmond giant keen to find ways of making a major search rival look bad.
Now, we don’t know whether other companies are holding similar sorts of meetings — I’m sure some are — but in my mind it makes a lot more sense to focus on developing decent products of your own than wasting time trying to bring down the “enemy”.
I was tempted to suggest that the company with the best products always rises to the top, but unfortunately Microsoft disproves that theory straight away. Maybe that’s why they’d like to use whatever tactics possible to improve Bing’s market share.
Thing is, Bing has a long way to go and it needs to target more than just Google to win the hearts and minds of searchers. The statistics show that even Windows-based Internet Explorer users aren’t flocking to Bing, and that’s when it’s the default browser!
Concentrate on making better products and people may start using them, because you can bet that trying to throw a spanner in the works of the world’s most popular browser isn’t going to stop people from using it.
Microsoft may be big enough to devote resources to both development and destruction, but why not simply lay off the latter and devote everyone’s time to bettering yourself? Besides, you’ve Apple, Mozilla and a host of other companies to have a go at; why add to the list?
Originally posted on August 30, 2009 @ 1:19 pm
Isn’t this something practiced at a lot of organizations. In marketing and distribution, its a well known fact that big companies use their power to push their products to small vendors to prevent them from selling products of competitors
Love all your cookies, as always. Enjoy Hello Cupcake.it is a very fun book!