How Microsoft caught Google napping
Google’s launch event on Wednesday, a rapid response to Microsoft’s presentation of its Bing ChatGPT feature, was a flop that prompted a nearly 10% drop in the company’s share price.
What did Google get so wrong? The launch reflected the panic that has gripped the company since the launch of ChatGTP in November. It had to put together a presentation at full speed and pinned together that told us less than the corporate blog post the day before, basically consisting of a few announcements but no commitment to a feature that, to make things even worse, produced a rather questionable search result.
It was a worst-case scenario: having garnered the world’s attention to say nothing new, the feature it was launching revealed haste and lack of planning, with a dodgy search result to boot. If the presentation of Microsoft’s new Bing resulted in a rise of around 5% in the company’s share price, Google’s generated a fall of almost 10%, and worse, a total impression of having been caught napping. While the headlines that greeted Microsoft’s event were along the lines of “search engines will never be the same again”, “competition with Google heats up”, “Bing makes online searching interesting again” and “Microsoft challenges Google”, Google’s prompted much less attention, and comments along the lines of “still several weeks behind Microsoft”.
