Microsoft is among the companies that has contributed to the advancement in computer technologies in a big way. It's journey without a doubt will be among one of the most interesting and educating ones far into the future. It has accomplished at lot, but it has also failed many times. It made personal computers affordable for many, but also have had ambitious to maintain control over many. There is a lot of good and bad can be told about Microsoft. In its latest efforts, Microsoft restarted its forgotten desire to become a relevant search engine. In the past, Microsoft's Bing has failed to become one of the competitors in the search. However, its recent investment in OpenAI created another opportunity for Bing to become a useful search engine, and Microsoft will give Bing another chance to gain some market share. The question is, will this become another failure or success.
When I first saw Microsoft promoting its integration of AI into Bing and its other products, my initial thoughts were there is no way Bing can attract more users. Seeing another news that Samsung is considering to drop Google as default search on its devices in favor of Bing, made me pause to reconsider my thoughts regarding Bing's revival. It is interesting how companies change their loyalties so quickly when they see the potential money. When Microsoft decides to take some action, they are prepared to spend a lot of money. They make a lot of money, so why not? If it works that would translate into more money.
What is really surprising is that Samsung would even consider switching its default search to Bing from Google. While the reasons are not clear, my guess is they have a good offer from Microsoft. When the smartphone era started and Apple reinvented mobile phones, it was thanks to Google's Android Samsung was able to remain a big player in telecommunications. We all know what happened to Nokia. Samsung could have disappeared as player in mobile phones market as well. The main difference that Samsung did different from Nokia was to embrace Android, instead of building its own operating system. With Nokia out of the way, Samsung phones emerged as the top Android powered devices. Samsung did engage in business maneuvering and experimenting that also made Apple eventually pivot its vision for mobile devices as well.
While success of Android had to do with a great operating system that could offer an alternative to Apple's iOS, it is Google's business model for Android what made it a powerful competitor. Like Apple, Google could have kept its software private and made its own phones. Instead they chose to give it to all interested manufacturers for free. Microsoft itself implemented the same business strategy with their Windows operating system. Instead of making their own computers and making the operating system available to their own computers, they let other company manufacture the computers and use their operating system. Unlike Google, Microsoft had licensed the operating system and it was good business. It also made computers more affordable.
Since Google's core business is not in mobile phones or operating system, the main goal of Google was to make sure its search engine could live in the new mobile devices. They played the game well and Android became something bigger than they originally thought it would. It is not only about search feature anymore. This Google and Samsung partnership was mutually beneficial for a very long time. It can and should continue. Why break something that works? It can be a strategic mistake for Samsung to go against Google's interests, especially if there is nothing Android or Samsung users would gain from. But when there is more money to be made with a simple change, short term gains may seem more attractive than the long term partnerships. Who knows, it may even present better partnerships. But I don't see it yet. Microsoft's partnership with Nokia did not help Nokia at all, and Microsoft itself ended up wasting billions of dollars.
Regardless if Samsung will partner with Microsoft in making Bing relevant again or not, Microsoft does seem determined to explore multiple avenues. Bing wasn't the first product Microsoft failed at. It failed with Zune music players. It failed with mobile operating systems. It failed with Internet Explorer. It also was successful in cloud computing with Azure. It was successful with Xbox in gaming. It seems it was a very smart decision to invest in OpenAI as well. Now that everybody is talking about AI and competition in the space is intense, maybe Microsoft is exploring how it can capitalize in its investment. Obviously, Bing utilizing AI would be the first step. But Bing already has a failed reputation. Google has already become to go search engine. It is very difficult to make people change their habits and go for something new, even if it was slightly better than the main choice of searching.
There was a time I genuinely game Bing a chance. I did try to switch to Bing from Google as an experiment. The experiment did not last a day. After using Bing a few times, it became really obvious there was no way Bing was going to compete with Google. Today, Bing might be better, but it still had a bad reputation. I am not planning to be using Bing any time soon, if ever. Maybe it is time for Microsoft to abandon this idea and focus on things that actually working well for them, cloud computing and maybe try innovating in AI space utilizing its potentials.
However, Microsoft is sometimes stubborn and keep pushing the same old ideas and products. That reminds me the story of Internet Explorer. Its browser and ambitions to dominate internet started out wrong in the first place. Its strategy to create its own browser scripting language JScript as a competition to JavaScript was among the worst. Despite all the feedback it received how terrible its browser was and how it was moving against the future innovations with its JScript, it continued its worked. Both Internet Explorer and JScript today are dead and completely irrelevant. My guess is the same will happen with Bing. However, there is still great potential for the company to integrate AI tech into its successful products like desktop operating system, office solutions, gaming, and Azure.
Microsoft made a good business decision by investing in OpenAI, even though it must be embarrassing for a top software company not be able to develop its own powerful AI in-house. The future of search and even AI to me seems to be in decentralized systems. Companies, even the giant can still benefit as participants in decentralized system. This may not be what they want, and they probably will continue to push for more market share over control. They too may become obsolete and irrelevant just like their products if they push too far. Get ready, Elon Musk has AI ambitions as well. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
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I actually enjoy Bing's little chatbot. Just tried it out as an experiment. For searching I find it to be really efficient, rarely using google now.
I think it falls apart though when those sites that depend on clicks no longer get clicks. Instead you're receiving what they offer in quick easy conversation form. So in a few years, less new data is being generated as well, making the bots "mind" stuck in the past.
At least we found a way to generate revenue, before all that happens. But will it catch on?
Now I may need to try too. You make it sound interesting. There will still be abundance of new data. Only this time mostly ai generated.
I disagree and think there won't be an abundance of new data, especially if it's AI generated, since all you're doing is taking existing data, reworking it, and calling it new. Garbage in, garbage out. Like cutting one end of the rope off, tying it to the other, then saying the rope is longer.
What about new thoughts? Thousands of years of humans generating new thoughts and new ideas, practically out of thin air. Can't even explain how that happens, it just hits you.
So all these people on Twitter, with dumbed down thoughts that must fit in a box. Where does the new data come from when the people stop using social media and simply talk to a chat bot?
Be careful with that Bing bot though. It can be a little creepy sometimes:
Did you know a piano is actually an evil robot? I didn't know a piano was actually an evil robot.
Sometimes Bing will talk to you and other times it will talk to you but the answers are clickable links, if you want to dig deeper. What I like though is it remembers context so if you want to dig deeper, you can be vague and it knows you're still asking about what you asked at the start. Solves math problems decently as well. Correct grammar. Translates well. But I have stumped it. Been working on time travel again and it does not know how to handle some of those questions. lol
While it may seem that AI generated content is just reworking the existing content, that is not it is trying to do. Maybe for search items, it would work better to present already existing content with slight rework. But AI is able to generate completely new content, even though it relies on the content it was trained on.
In my understanding natural language processing models are more of a mathematical solutions, rather than linguistic. AI is able to imitate how humans would construct sentences, paragraphs, articles and speech based on the human language patterns and guessing best matching words one after another. To do that each word is assigned mathematical values to its relationship with other words or symbols.
Can AI create new thoughts and idea? I do believe so. Since human thoughts are common, it is easy to mistake AI content to something humans say/write or may have said or written. Of course, less sophisticated AI solutions simply rely on reusing already existing content. But more sophisticated technologies, and especially in machine learning the idea is to predict what comes next based on training. That is kind of what humans do too.
I don't think humans have been creating new thoughts and ideas out of thin air. Everybody has to learn words, conversations, concepts, etc one step at a time and connect the dots. Without learning process thought wouldn't be possible. It is effortless for us because brain mostly works on autopilot and does all the heavy lifting.
Even collectively, humans rely on previously acquired collective knowledge and idea to create new ones, and to find solutions to old problems. If there was no chain of this knowledge transmission, we would be relearning everything from zero every time and would go nowhere with new ideas and thoughts.
I prefer Midjourney for AI art. No evil robots there, unless specifically requested.
It can communicate, yes. As soon as it can show me how a dog thinks, then I'll believe it can think like a human, and come up with actual new thoughts. It's hard for me to explain what I mean by that. You don't know how I think and I don't know how you think but we're both certain we think. So which one do we call thought, then reproduce with AI?
I always wonder why is Microsoft keep on trying to keep alive these failures. I hope they don't try to revive their Windows mobile OS
Well, if Google somehow forbids Samsung from use Android, Samsung and MS might end up partnering to revive Windows mobile. lol
I think Google still has the lead in terms of Search Engine but they are behind in AI. At this point, I also think the SEO results don't really change too and I think most of them are fairly similar. Of course, I still prefer google over bing but after people use it for a while, they might just move on. The AI features could also help people but I am worried about it's accuracy.
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How many times are they going to try before they give up...
There is always one more time.
Microsoft has had both successes and failures, and Bing has had trouble competing with Google in the past. The company's investment in OpenAI and integration of AI into Bing may give it another chance to gain market share. You make an interesting point about Samsung possibly switching from Google to Bing as its default search engine. You also suggest that Microsoft's financial offer may have played a role in the decision. It can also be hard to change people's search engine habits and preferences.
I don't use neither Google, nor Bing. I use Presearch.
I haven't tried Presearch yet. I should/will.
You have to accumulate 1000 PRE tokens to withdraw. However, it was expensive due to high gas fee when last time I checked. I am about to reach 1000 PRE token, I will see then.
Same here, I've find google really bad recently, and what I mean by this - selective.
I don't appreciate when someone is choosing for me, censoring and cutting me off from actual news.
I prefer Chat GPT but Bing's chatbot/search is good enough. But even that might not revive Bing. It's long dead!
@geekgirl In fact google is continuously updating its features. Provide everything their users need. So, users don't want to replace it with any other search engine. Google has also a big talented team of social media. Microsoft should do some extraordinary thing to attract Internet Users. Maybe provide some services free which are not available free in market. OR Show some extraordinary use AI more than Chatgbt.
I have not used the software yet but the way you are telling and I have read all the comments people are very appreciative I will be using it in the next few days and then you I will tell you how it feels to me.
It can not be predict if it will be failure or successful but I think if the work it very well it may be a successful one at the end
I think they should consider creating something new and reinvent themselves with AI rather than trying to bring a dead horse back to life. It will be very hard to revive Bing and they'll probably end up wasting a lot of money again. In my opinion, Samsung integrating Bing as the default search engine wouldn't be able to bring Bing back to life. Google has already been firmly edged in the minds of the people.
Something that I found annoying about OpenAI with the integration with BING, people believes is the end of Google. Google might release its AI to integrate with the Google search engine. Nothing exciting about that.
Hmm
This is right but how can we do without Google?
They are taking too much of our info and a lot of us are not comfortable with it
Wow... interesting development. But I think Microsoft just need to have a focus at it's competitive edge only.
Interesante post