Microsoft is making a major push to integrate social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter into its Bing search engine: users will soon be able to “Ping” search results they like to their friends directly from Bing. Back in January, in “Google, the Innovator’s Dilemma and the Future of Search & Web Ads,” I talked about the implications of this history of search from the WSJ):
Microsoft missed its opportunities to get into paid search not because it was “dumb,” “uninnovative” or a “bad” company, but for the same sorts of reasons that big, highly successful and even particularly innovative companies fail. The reasons companies generally succeed in mastering “adaptive” innovation of the technologies behind their established business models are the very reasons why such great companies struggle to encourage or channel the “disruptive” innovation that renders their core technologies and business models obsolete. This dynamic was described brilliantly in Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen’s classic 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail…
Let’s hope that Microsoft—as well as Yahoo!—have carefully studied the vast literature produced by business schools in the wake of Christensen’s book about how big companies can avoid the Innovator’s Dilemma by promoting—and capitalizing on—radical innovation from within. Indeed, this seems to be precisely what has guided Google’s own strategy as it has grown from “disruptive innovator” to become the very sort of behemoth that cannot easily escape the Dilemma, even if corporate managers are fully aware of the problem on a theoretical level. If Google can do it, Microsoft should be able to, too. But let’s also not discount the possibility that, no matter how hard Google’s management might try to retain the innovative culture of a start-up, the giant
can’t do that well enough to prevent its own apparent market dominance from being disrupted by new upstart innovators in search and advertising technologies.
My prediction seems to be coming true: Microsoft, with less to lose and without a huge installed user base to worry about annoying by violating Google’s “Prime Directive” of elegant simplicity, may have an easier time introducing “disruptive” innovations to search than Google. Of course, it’s unlikely that any
one feature will prove the “killer app” that suddenly causes Bing’s market share to explode—and Google’s to plummet—but a steady stream of such nifty features could convince many users to switch to Bing.
At 29, I’m old enough to remember when Microsoft seemed as cool as Google does today. Hell, I remember being thrilled as a sophomore in high school by Bill Gates’ 1995 book
The Road Ahead and the accompanying CD-ROM (which included, as I recall, a tour of Gates’s ultra-futuristic home). If Microsoft can “get its mojo back,” the company could truly become a web services provider to rival Google. We’d all benefit from having more choices in search engines, advertising platforms and related tools. And, driving each other to “build a better mousetrap,” the two companies could lead us down the “Road Ahead” from Search 2.0 to Search 3.0 and beyond. So here’s to hoping that Redmond can solve the “Innovator’s Dilemma” with tools like Google’s “20 percent” time that free engineers to innovate!
We’ve written a lot lately about Microsoft’s efforts to reinvent itself, first rebranding its Live search engine as the Bing, and then partnering with Yahoo! to make Bing the search engine on Yahoo!’s still-impressive empire of content and services. But if Microsoft is going to beat Google in Search 3.0 and master shifts in the driving paradigms of the Internet from search and browsers to ubiquitous integration of social networking and other paradigms as yet unforeseen, Microsoft will need more than just brilliant engineering: They’ll need clever marketing.
So it seems that the software titan is turning to user-generated advertising, such as this gem:
http://www.youtube.com/v/h9DBynJUCS4&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1
WARNING: Battlestar Galactica spoiler: Google may well be in danger of losing its monopoly on cool to Microsoft if Bing can get at least four of the Final Five Cylons to volunteer as back-up singers in a promo video contest.
Google clearly considers Microsoft a threat, having recently launched an ad campaign of its own for its Apps services, which compete directly with Microsoft Office.
The new Maine law I blogged about on Sunday is much worse than I thought based on my initial reading. If allowed to stand, it would constitute a sweeping age verification mandate introduced through the back door of “child protection.”
The law, which goes into effect in September, would extend the approach of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998 by requiring “verifiable parental consent” before the collection of kids “personal information” about kids, not just those under 13, but also adolescents age 13-17. Unlike other state-level proposals in New Jersey, Illinois, Georgia and North Carolina, Maine’s “COPPA 2.0” law would also cover health information, but would only govern the collection and use of data for marketing purposes (while the FTC has interpreted COPPA to cover to essentially any capability for communicating personal information among users).
But the Maine law would go much further than these proposals or COPPA itself by banning transfer or use of such data in anything other than de-identified, aggregate form. Still I took some comfort in the fact that the Maine law, unlike COPPA or these other proposals, lacked the second of COPPA’s two prongs: (i) collection from kids and (ii) collection on sites that are directed at kids. It’s because of the second prong that COPPA applies not only when a site operator knows that it’s collecting information from kids (or merely allowing them to share information with other users), but also when the operator’s site is (like, say, Club Penguin) targeted to kids in terms of its subject matter, branding, interface,
etc. Because I initially concluded that the Maine law would apply only to knowing collection, I supposed that it would be less likely to require age verification of all users, as other COPPA 2.0 proposals would—something that would be unlikely to survive a First Amendment challenge based on the harm to online anonymity.
But I was quite wrong. During the PFF Capitol Hill briefing Adam and I held on Monday, Jim Halpert, one of our panelists, noted that the bill imposed “strict liability.” Continue reading →
Maine has just enacted a law severely restricting marketing to kids: the Act To Prevent Predatory Marketing Practices against Minors, summarized by Covington & Burling. Adam and I released a major paper in June about such laws: COPPA 2.0: The New Battle over Privacy, Age Verification, Online Safety & Free Speech. Maine is following the lead of several other states that have tried to expand the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998 to cover nost just kids under 13 but adolescents as well and potentially all social networking sites. We discussed at length the problems such laws create, particularly the possibility that large numbers of adults would, for the first time, be subject to age verification mandates before accessing (or participating in) the growing range of sites with social networking capabilities. This, in turn, would significantly “chill” free speech online by undermining anonymity.
Like COPPA 2.0 proposals in New Jersey (simply extending COPPA to cover adolescents) and Illinois (applying COPPA to most social networking sites), the Maine law tries to build on COPPA’s “verifiable parental consent” requirement for the 13-17 audience as well as those under 13.
On the one hand, the Maine law goes much further than these other COPPA 2.0 proposals. While the original bill was limited to the Internet and wireless communications, the final bill’s scope applies to all communications. The bill also covers “health-related” information (HRI) as well as “personal information” (PI). On the other hand, the Maine law is thus somewhat narrower than other COPPA 2.0 proposals and COPPA itself in that it applies only to “marketing or advertising products, goods or services.” While COPPA is commonly misunderstood to cover only marketing, it actually covers essentially any “collection” (broadly defined) of personal information from kids for any purpose—including merely giving kids access to communications functionality that might let them share personal information with other users (even if the site itself is not “collecting” that information in the commonly understood sense).
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.