Bing Coming to Android

Why do they need any chutzpah credit. For Microsoft, I think it goes like this: If you can’t beat ’em, ride their open source mobile operating system’s success’s coattails by coding up some Bing crap with Android’s free SDK. Why not. Not like there are a lot of people out there who will suddenly lean away from buying that WP7 phone one day and going Google having found out that they can Bing around with a Google phone with a little search client widget with mapping features or whatever.

As for its development, Microsoft is a pretty big company and I see very aggressive development with routine updates, and not superficial ones, of one-man operation applications, so since this is just a search client we’re talking about, one presumably written in a language many of their developers already know, it’s not exactly a huge commitment of resources whose fate of further development will be sealed by whether or not Googlers have jingoist loyalty to stay away from software like this which by the way is pretty much redundant given what Google and the Android market already provides.

On the other hand, it is kind of a small symbolic concession on Microsoft’s part that at least some of their coded awesomeness can be unleashed on a Google-powered phone.

But I suspect on the list of priorities of Microsoft getting Bing more market share towers over anything related to their historically failed phone division. So by all means, do this, keep it warm for all those iPhone users, stay friendly with the Chinese to slide in Bing even on Android phones to China Telecom, whatever it takes to spread Bing. Bing is their pony (and Windows 7), but Windows Phone 7, not so much.

To answer your question a little more succinctly, this will be much more tepidly adopted by Googlers than it has been and will continue to be by iPhone users because of both loyalty and because we hate Microsoft while Apple hates Google.

My question to you is will you see such a thing from Google showing up on those WP7 phones?

As someone who’s neither Google nor Microsoft, and quite happily that way, let me offer you my take on those two troublemakers. I’mma break it down for you metaphor style; pay attention.

Now picture a forest. Let’s call it the Innovation Forest.

Camp Google has a bunch of scouts slicing their way through that forest in all sorts of directions, trailblazing (some of those trailblazers losing reception on their walkie talkies when discussing wardriving protocols), leaving chalk marks in the trees of sweetness, but not stopping for long at those tries to tap into them to extract the sap and refine it further.

Team Microsoft, with both recon and construction batallions, watches those Google trailblazers, follows them from a distance, taking note of which of those market trees have the richest sap in them. Then they call back to base with the GPS coordinates of the best trails Camp Google found and the construction battalion rolls in with their heavy machinery, the first line clearing out the trees followed by steamrollers and finally the road paving squad.

Microsoft’s approach takes more time of course and they don’t deserve any trophies for inventiveness but when they open up those roads there aren’t too many beta signs on them and during that construction period they decorate things to add some sizzle and glitter that Google forgot about when they moved onto the Google Ride and the Google Web Accelerator trees.

Now Apple’s in another forest altogether. The forest has no name, for security reasons. The first thing they do is build a huge wall, Berlin style, around the entire forest, then their troops, consisting of men from West Point, MIT and some engineering university, do both the secret trailblazing and the secret refinement and don’t emerge from that forest, not even to blog, until they’ve got the perfect, one antenna issue notwithstanding, product.

Jackasses.

@Who dis?!
That has to be one of the most entertaining comments I have ever read. Thank you.

Well shoot Jim, what a sweetheart you are. I am touched that you’d ask for my permission (unlike David K and Simmons who thinks this gold that I spin is open season for their own posts).

Go to town Doc, though I suppose copy paste Simmons’s copypasta as he took the liberty of proofreading some of my minor mistakes. Minor, like this whole antenna thing.