Comments on: The Pepsi Challenge 2.0, Reputational Incentives & Genericide as a Check on Google’s Brand Power

By: yusuf mehdi - StartTags.com

yusuf mehdi - StartTags.com — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:54:18 +0000

[...] of MSN Information Services and Merchant Platform division, at MSN's customer summit in Redmond. …The Pepsi Challenge 2.0, Reputational Incentives & Genericide …A stark sign of the challenge Yusuf Mehdi faces as a point man for Microsoft in the company's battle [...]

By: rafiseddiqi

rafiseddiqi — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:40:03 +0000

If Microsoft want to win this race, they have to produce a better product - no doubt about it.

In the future, the best product would be the one that will eliminate the gap between human and computers and solve the problem of search simultanously. As the article referenced in the post suggested (http://www.codingfuture.com/future-of-search-ku...) devices like Sixthsense (http://www.codingfuture.com/sixthsense-gestural...) combined with intelligent search engines have to become the future of search.

So in a nutshell the winner will have to solve the problem of human computer interaction and search simultaneously.

I know Microsoft has a similar device to sixthsense: http://www.codingfuture.com/microsoft-sensecam-...

Why not improve that device and use it with Kumo ...

Anyways just my .1 cent.

By: mike fabio

mike fabio — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:34:25 +0000

You bring up some pretty excellent points here, Berin. Indeed Google is well known for its approach to building brand equity: deliver incredible products for free that change people's lives, create an aura of "cool" (and this goes way beyond Google Lunar X PRIZE... don't forget about free food, cute Android icons, etc.), and allow the public to spread the good word.

I think, though, that there's one very important factor in play here that has caused Microsoft to lag behind Google in this department: Windows. It doesn't take a genius to know that early versions of Windows were buggy, hard to use, and - advanced as they may have been at the time - lacking in a lot of the power and schnazz of other operating systems. Today this translates as "OS X and Ubuntu are just prettier, and they don't crash" equalling "Microsoft sucks." I'm not saying this is TRUE, I'm only saying that public opinion has shifted because Microsoft has failed to deliver incredible products. Why, then, would they have built an entire marketing campaign around "WOW"? Regardless of whether Vista was a great operating system, public opinion instantly swayed toward the negative, and Microsoft continues to battle this trend.

Google (and many other companies) continually deliver, leading to happy customers, which leads to good word of mouth advertising, which builds brand equity. Simple as that. If you build it, [they] will come.

[Full disclosure: I'm the community manager and Google Liaison for the Google Lunar X PRIZE]

By: rafiseddiqi

rafiseddiqi — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:40:03 +0000

By: Rafi

Rafi — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 19:40:03 +0000

By: mike fabio

mike fabio — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 17:34:25 +0000

By: Chris Parandian

Chris Parandian — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:17:49 +0000

On a related note, Google won't make the same mistake as Coke and offer “New Coke” due to the increased efforts of MSFT. Goog realizes that the competition on a better search product could come from other places (for instance, a real-time twitter search). It will be exciting watching this all play out…

By: Jonathan Stray

Jonathan Stray — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 14:51:26 +0000

"But there is a certain elegance to the fact that existing laws provide some competitive check on the marketplace without the need for government regulation or an antitrust lawsuit."

Existing laws are government regulation.