Something has been puzzling me for some time now: Microsoft, convicted for having an illegal monopoly, have desperately been assaulting Googles stronghold, by creating a new search engine (www.bing.com being their latest incarnation).

On the surface, this makes sense: the web is an important future platform so of course Microsoft don't want to be left behind. The trouble with this comes, as stuff like this often do, when you dig a little bit under the surface. Unlike the physical world, the world of bits and bytes is prone to natural monopolies — something Microsoft knows well — and if one search-engine is superior to another (even the slightest) there is no reason to not use the best. If the corner shop is slightly more expensive, you might go there anyway since it is convenient but on the Internet the distance to the shops are the same.

This leaves only three things left for Microsoft to fight over:

1. The price to use the search engine
2. The quality of the search engine
3. The quality of their Washington connections

I originally thought that Microsoft was going to ignore point one, as Google is free to use and that is the cheapest price possible, but I was wrong again (noticed any pattern here?) since Microsoft figured out that they could share some of the kickbacks they get for the traveling agencies when the user books their travel through Bing. I doubt that this will change much though – how many people even know that this is an option? Should this really prove to be a threat to Google they can easily do the same. I have never meet a person who objected to the adds on Google, so Microsoft can't beat them here either.

If Microsoft wants to compete with Google on the quality of their search engine, they are in for a rude wake-up-call: they will have to fight an opponent on their own turf who have a decade of experience in the field. About the only thing Microsoft has going for it in that fight would be that they don't have to make money on the service anytime soon, and they can afford to send an army to work on Bing, just like they did with Internet Explorer. That won't work, because Google is already free.

The third option is a lot more evil, but it can be very useful. Microsoft learned this the hard way when they lost the antitrust suit in the late nineties because their connections wheren't good enough, Google has yet to learn this (witness the problems they have with the Sherman Antitrust act) and so this is one area where Microsoft has an advantage.

Although such moves can lead to some interesting results, my prediction on the hole matter is that Bing will fall flat on its face and any traffic they get will be from the fact that they are the default search engine in Internet Explorer.

This leaves just one question: Why launch it in the first place?