… and then on Google:

Check and out decide which wins yourself!

Overwhelming Value Proposition:

One of the things that any business is in search of is a a value proposition that customers just can’t turn down. Let’s use Geoffrey Moore’s classic positioning framework to delve into this:

• FOR …. people who may occasionally sin [note, that’s almost everyone]
• WHO ARE DISSATISFIED WITH …. the prospect of going to hell [note, the church was smart to portray the consequences of not going to church here]
• The Church IS ….
• A … path to the salvation of your soul and gateway to heaven [now, who wouldn’t want this!]
• UNLIKE …. other religions [lot of competition and legacy installed base to overcome!]
• The Church OFFERS …. a community [cluster effect, you need critical mass in an area to succeed]

That’s genius. Steve Jobs couldn’t have done better if he had tried!

Customer Lifecycle Management:

Now, anyone who works in business will know that a real challenge is to keep people coming back to your wares. The first purchase just isn’t enough.

• Product Diversification: Being baptized is just the entry point. You can be baptized at birth or at any time in your life. But once you are in, you have Holy Communions, Confirmations, Marriages, Deaths. Something for everyone throughout their life.
• Constant Customer Contact: OK, so you’ve got the major life milestones to prevent churn. But what about more frequent visits to maintain cash flow. There you have Sunday worship. In many countries, Sunday’s are a day off in part by the church’s efforts to strip out alternatives to attendance.
• Loyalty Program: To give folks a little incentive, the church has confessions. This allows sinners to come in, tell a priest about their sins, and be forgiven. Woosh, that’s enough for most folks to want to come back I’m sure.

Sustainable Access to Capital:

Business is about money, and despite the other do-gooding intentions, the church excels here too.

• Broad Income Base: Back when Europe was a fragmented base of huts, the church was a central entity with tight control from home. Local chapters around the continent collected cash from peasants and sent a portion to the pope in Rome. This made the pope richer than most kings, who only had their own country to turn to for income, save maybe an invasion to plunder an ancestral claim to another throne.
• Political Influence: The pope’s ability to command the hearts and souls of citizens of other dominions, made him the king on earth. You could argue that is what Henry VIII of England really hated, that someone else could potentially have more power than he did over his own people. This allowed the pope to ensure there was a balance of power that would preserve the church’s access to capital.
• Patronage: While peasants paid tieth to the church, the richer folks tried to accelerate their salvation by donating larger sums, even estates to the church. From Cambridge Colleges to vast farming estates, these assets were a great source of income through good and bad times.
• Artwork Assets: The church was smart in identifying great artistic talent and commissioning them to create lasting work. Can you imagine the majesty of a Norman church when the entire community still lived in wattle and daub huts? Or the inspiration to anyone, even kings, when the walked into St. Peters in Rome. Not only was artwork the equivalent of today’s skyscraper but also a source of income down the road.

Access to Talent:

• Lifetime Employment: At times when the world was full of chance, the stability of employment in the church must have been a draw to many folks. You didn’t have to go to war, you had sanctuary from bad folks, you may not be rich but usually you had food. For life.
• Global Talent Supply: The church may have been one of the first to move to talent around globally, or at least cross train. Young rising stars would come to the Roman hub, get indoctrinated and then return to their flocks. In later time, missionaries would span the world converting and setting up new chapters.
• Meritocracy: At a time when hereditary rights dictated your standing in life, not being (officially) allowed to have children must have made the church one of the first true meritocracies. Your success could not be passed down or inherited. Your standing was solely based on your talent and accomplishments in this life. Wow, that was ground breaking stuff.

A lot of this success was in the early days. In the 21st century the church faces many challenges:

• Breach of Trust: If your core product is salvation of the soul, you have to be beyond reproach morally yourself. An analogy may be, if you sell privacy protection, you can’t be hacked. With scandals surrounding priests, that has come into the question, accelerated by today’s rabid media. The core value proposition of the church has been diluted.
• Competition: Today, there are many multi-faith communities. So the community value of one religion is dissolving. Sadly, there are still areas where freedom of religion is not whole, but the trend is surely there. In such environments, it’s hard for the church to keep out others. Not just other religions, but NGOs and charities such as Gates Foundation are now plausible alternatives for donations. You could argue that the church missed an opportunity here to help those in need, not just Christians. Kind of an “innovators dilemma” case.
• Talent: There are more and more meritocratic institutions in the world that talented young folks can join. While the church still has access to the poor, the key will be for them to identify and groom the best, and to keep them in the church.

The church still has a fundamental role it can play in society. Let’s see if it can flourish in the next 100 years as it has in the last 2000.

“This should make Bing more versatile but what it has going for it now, first and foremost, is this: the search results of Bing are – difficult to believe – at par with Google. I don’t know if it had anything to do with the algo change that Google made but when searching for news I was pulling up a lot of marginal blogs I didn’t care for. So I switched to Bing and was surprised by how much it had improved. The right panel with flowing twitter feeds relevant to the search phrase are just very cool… “

So what’s social search all about? The best way to illustrate is to walk through a scenario. Say I’m heading out to New York. I do a search on Bing and I get a great “instant answer”:

As well as some key pieces of info, I also see that I have a few friends who live in the area pulled from info on Facebook. Dazhi used to work with me at Microsoft and now I see he is in New York so I check out his Facebook profile.

While there, I see he likes a site called Holy Kaw. Not sure what that is, I search on Bing. NOTE: If YOU do this search, you will see the answer below but unless one of your friends also likes the site, you won’t see any likes. Bing results are PERSONAL to you. Anyways, right there on the results page, I see an answer about the site and the fact that Dazhi likes it.

So of course, I check out the site. Now, I notice on the right hand side that I have the option to like the site myself. But sometimes it’s hard to tell whether you are liking the fan page of the site or the just the webpage. I just want to do the latter, so I use the universal like button on the new Bing Bar (top right corner of image below) to like just the site. This is the first like button that you can use anywhere on the web, which is pretty powerful.

All this sounds pretty interesting. Let’s say I wanted to get in touch with Dazhi. I can do a search from within Bing and voila, I have a people answer. I see Dazhi and can even send him a Facebook message from Bing.

Now, I turn my attention to something else, cooking the family dinner. Anyone who knows my wife will know that she eats anything as long as it has chicken in it. So I do a search for chicken recipes. I get the usual answers, but at the bottom of the first page, I see this site I would never have found, but an old colleague of mine seems to like it. With Bing social search, we’ve matched the entity site to the search term and shown which friends like it. Pretty cool.

OK, so to cook one of the recipes, I need a decent wok as ours is pretty run down. So I go to Bing shopping and search for woks, and I get the result below. I filter down to a price range I like and can add the items to my shopping list. Now, I’m no expert on woks but some of my friends are. With one click I can share the list on Facebook and get suggestions from my friends on the best one.

All this is built on the “like-o-sphere”. The more people like things, the more tailored results will get. Now, I am not advocating indiscriminate liking, but it’s sometimes good to call out cool things you discover on the web. Your friends may not know to ask you, but you can bet sometimes they wish they had. You can help them by downloading the Bing Bar and using the like button!

To see the social features on Bing, you will need to sign in either using the Bing Bar or using the little Facebook icon on the top right of the page, see image below.

Try out your own scenarios. And if you are still living in the dark ages of Google, see if you can find anything social. Give Bing a shot, you never know, you might even “Like” us

Game on!

I am however a little disappointed on the business side for the product. I still don’t think it has captured the potential it could with biz model innovation. Let’s see how they do over the next year.

As the information load increased, she found, so did activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region behind the forehead that is responsible for decision making and control of emotions. But as the researchers gave the bidders more and more information, activity in the dorsolateral PFC suddenly fell off, as if a circuit breaker had popped. “The bidders reach cognitive and information overload,” says Dimoka.

Most of us have experienced this somewhat. It’s almost a full cycle in play – when there is no information we make instinct based decisions; then with more information we make data driven decisions; finally, with too much information we go back to instinct decisions. Or do we?

The danger here and the key insight for me is that too much information can shut down logic, whereas too little information forces you to use instinct much more. Put another way, no information may be better in some ways than too much information.

That’s not where anyone wants to go though. A better solution would be put more wood behind helping users get the information they need rather than just inundating them with information. This is something I am super excited about as it is in line with the mission over in Bing – to help users complete tasks. By re-pivoting the goal of search engines to a user centric view (what I want to get done) vs. a provider centric view (organizing information for example), you end up making drastically different choices in the capabilities you build. I think the results speak for themselves as you compare the experiences on leading search engines and Bing for example.

On a practical level, the weather and traffic tabs are awesome if you quickly want to check the state of the roads or slopes before you head out. I drive to work so traffic on the highway can add 30 minutes to my commute if I get it wrong – there is a work around on the backstreets that only adds 5 minutes or so.

There are other useful features too, like the news and stock reader for quick check on what’s going on in the world, the movie and game tabs for some alternative mental stimulation, the dictionary for when you don’t know a word but don’t want to open up a new browser tab. And finally, the translator which translates websites, automatically if you wish. This is my blog in Traditional Chinese!

This isn’t your older brothers tool bar, go check it out!

Google Accuses Bing of Cheating

Google has run a sting operation that it says proves Bing has been watching what people search for on Google, the sites they select from Google’s results, then uses that information to improve Bing’s own search listings. Bing doesn’t deny this.

Google Sounds Hypocritical

Google copies every original idea it can find, like a massive information sponge, sucking up business models and innovative creations and forming its own duplicates, often with little success. In the last year, its most obvious advances were copies of Twitter… and the revised layout of Bing.

Bing Says We Don’t Cheat

We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop. We have some of the best minds in the world at work on search quality and relevance, and for a competitor to accuse any one of these people of such activity is just insulting.

Conclusion: Bing Matters!

Anyone watching Google and Microsoft spar over search results has to be torn between being shocked and amused. Google accuses Microsoft of stealing its search results for Bing. Microsoft says it doesn’t steal Google results. A lot of discussion ensues—some of it hysterical. My bottom line: Bing matters.

As I have blogged about before, Bing gets you the answer you need faster rather than just loading the page a thousandth of a second more quickly. Take a look at a simple search to compare compare teams on Bing (left) and Google (right). You still get the web answers, but rather than clicking on several links and hitting the back button, you get the basics on the main results page.

or maybe the quarterbacks for comparison ….

Bing (top image below) even has a feature called “Visual Search” that allows you to explore the teams easily from a single place making topical exploration easier vs. the pure web results from Google (bottom image).

Check out some searches and let the results speak for themselves.

“A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it’s like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I’ve done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:
• attend a sleepover
• have a play date
• be in a school play
• complain about not being in a school play
• watch TV or play computer games
• choose their own extracurricular activities
• get any grade less than an A
• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
• play any instrument other than the piano or violin
• not play the piano or violin.”

Read the article here.