Google vs. Microsoft & Everybody Else

And seemingly just like that, we’re in a hot war over search. We had two decades of relative stability with one player being dominant over most of that time. Now, is the search game afoot?

People have been predicting that Google’s dominance in search will be destroyed by AI. I hold a counter POV that Google has plenty of options like integrating their own AI into search, releasing additional AI tools, investing even more into AI and innovating through acquisition. It would seem that Google is doing all of these. But so is Microsoft. And Baidu. And even Apple. All of them are pursuing AI innovation through acquisition and partnership.

Microsoft clearly has options to, though, and was early to exercise them. The integration of ChatGPT into Microsoft products (many of them), and not just their Bing search engine, is a fast mover’s strong move. Nothing a few hundred billion dollars can’t fix, right? This is what trillion dollar companies do when faced with a novel opportunity and an existential threat to the core of their business. Attack. Attack. Attack. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being moved across the battlefield in time horizons measured in weeks.

If Microsoft can peel off even 10-15% from Google’s dominance in search market share by being a faster innovator (through partnership and acquisition), grabbing some of the burgeoning AI hype, and being the first with a solid AI integrated search UX, that is potentially a significant bridgehead on which to build. Bing really is a pretty good search engine already, the UX is better than Google’s by a magnitude. More people should experience it.

Google announced a big reveal related to search and AI for 2/8. Then Microsoft made a surprise announcement for a 2/7 event eclipsing Google. Where do you think this is going?