Bing loses to Google.. yet again
Why Microsoft lost the search wars again with Google even with GenAI enabled search. And why it doesn't matter at all.
When bing first launched chatgpt integration, I was happy. Very happy, so happy that I played with it for 4 hours. It was awesome. Free version of chatgpt with extra advantages like browsing the internet and other cool stuffs.
Fast forward 9 months, we see this
Bing loses search market share to Google despite ChatGPT integration
https://www.techspot.com/news/100818-bing-loses-search-market-share-google-despite-chatgpt.html
This made sense to me. Let me tell you why..
When it first began, I was almost in love with it. What I had to do was download the bing chat app on my phone and I was on. I could have a chat with the latest version of GPT(3.5 at that time) that could browse the web. This felt better far better than the traditional ad-ridden Google search and even better than non-internet browsing chatgpt.
I was talking to it about generating a Power Automate flow or how to write a PowerShell script to do something and it would come back with actual results.
Things changed for worse over the next months
The app started started feeling buggy as heck. Mainly because there were multiple mini-apps within the bing app on my phone. It started feeling slow. Response took longer to generate than usual. I then started using chatgpt web version. It felt much better. Results were instant. And I didn't have to go through the buggy app as well.
Another big deal was the desktop version of bing chat only being available in edge browser. Which was fine but then I couldn't log in with my work email address and had to login with my “Microsoft” email address to be able to use it. I stopped using it at all on my PC. Only when I switched to chatgpt on my phone then later my PC, I realised it was super easy to use the chatgpt interface on any device.
Why did this happen?
Different purposes: Microsoft needed bing to generate money, OpenAI (company behind chatgpt) needed theirs to generate users. Google just needed to be okay with what they were doing. We forget google for now and focus why bing chat with AI failed while chatgpt succeeded. It takes computation to run chatgpt instance, which isn't cheap to run at scale. Microsoft needed to run at loss with bing for it to have any impact. This meant having a web version for people like me and having quicker results. They failed. OpenAI succeded here with Microsoft's money, sounds ironic but not.
Stupidity: If you want to compete with something as universally used as google, you don't half-ass it. MS product team overestimated the value they provided with gpt with browsing capabilities (which OpenAI was slow to release) which came with a huge baggage of being able to download their app or browser and logging in with their accounts with most work accounts having no access for a significant period of time.
Two headed snake: Microsoft launched bing for enterprise after a while, which is a much secure version of bing chat as it doesn't collect user data to be sent to Microsoft servers. It has a huge value proposition compared to OpenAI which only had this feature last month. But because of the feature, they disabled chatgpt on work accounts creating more friction which drove users away. As they say, focus is the key to winning. Microsoft has multiple heads, losing unilateral focus.
Maybe they didn't need to succeed: OpenAI is now valued at 80 billion+. Microsoft put close to 10 billion for approx. half the stake. That at least 3x their return on investment by doing nothing. They allowed bing to stay profitable and allowed Open AI to succeed too. Winning on both ends. Plus, there's so much benefit with integrating ChatGPT with their existing portfolio of products from Azure Search to the Power Platform whose benefit is already being realised by lots of companies.
Conclusion here is Microsoft is winning even if it's not the win it was hoping for. Chatgpt is consuming the world and with it, so is Microsoft.