Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are all offering some form of courtesy Wi-Fi through the holiday season, at venues such as airports, hotels and Times Square.
Each has a relatively new service it’s hoping to attract consumers to, whether it’s Google’s Chrome browser, Microsoft’s Bing search engine or Yahoo’s revamped home page and customization features.
In bringing together their search traffic, Microsoft and Yahoo are fighting an unwinnable war. Worse, they are still fighting the last war.
Kayak, the popular multi-airline airfare search engine, thinks Microsoft Bing’s new travel search engine looks so much like its own that it’s confusing Kayak users.
The New York Post yesterday ran a squishy story with the nifty headline “Fear Grips Google,” that seems to be the talk of the tech blogosphere today on a fairly news-less Monday. The thesis is that the search giant has sprung into action out of concern of some of the early kudos Microsoft is getting for Bing, its new search engine.
In theory, getting users to ditch one Internet search engine for another should be an easy sell. But doing so is likely to cost Microsoft every penny of the roughly $100 million it plans to spend on an advertising campaign that starts Wednesday for its new Bing search engine.
In economist speak, there are virtually no “switching costs” for a consumer that wants to change from one search engine to another, other than the burden of typing Bing.com into a Web browser instead of Google.com.
Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site. (Click on the image to see a bigger version.)
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