Plp- Bings Competitive Advantages

“Bing” it on Google Introduction Mark Penn is taking a big leap by leaving his firm to work for Microsoft on a mission to fix Bing. The company is faced with becoming a competitive leader in the search engine area. Penn believes he can enter Microsoft with a different strategy. To improve Bing, Penn believes he needs Stack Ranking, which focuses product developers away from getting industry-leading products to market faster than the competition. According to the article, not including the marketing or the billions of dollars put into Bing, Google accounted for 69% of the searches in June alone.

They say the key strategy to turn this company around would be to come up with an approach that would make Bing a different kind of search engine compared to Google. Analysis As stated above, Microsoft is trying to take the number one spot for the most used search engine. A competitive advantage can be defined as a firm’s ability to create value in a way that its rivals cannot. Microsoft and Yahoo! introduced Bing in 2009, which allows users to search for information regarding almost anything. While being introduced to everyone in 2009 other search engines were available.

Bing’s competitive advantage over the others was that Bing offered subcategories onto the organic search results, allowing the user to quickly see the search results in logical groups. This is an issue for Bing because they are not the only company that offers these types of search engine results and no longer have a competitive advantage in the market on this basis. Another advantage with Bing, you get “enhanced results” which can also be taken as intelligently organized results that you can receive quickly and efficiently.

Because of these enhanced results, many people chose to use the Bing search engine over Google but in recent years, other search engines have put a greater emphasis on their speed and results and are bypassing Bing. If Bing still had any competitive advantage, it would be that it offers enhanced results in search engines, however it has been proven for most businesses that use other competitors’ search engines their speed and results are sufficient and they prefer them to Bing.

This is evident which stated before that 69% of the search engine users chose Google over the 25. 6% for Bing. What hurt the Microsoft Company is that Bing was doing so poorly to the point they offered Penn a position to help “fix” Bing. This could make or break Bing seeing whether Penn can differentiate this search engine compared to the others. This will be difficult for Penn seeing that he lacks search engine product development expertise.

No matter how speedy this search engine is or how well the results are, if Penn does not find a way to improve Bings market share this will be just a fad that the Microsoft has gone through and Google will continue doing well. Conclusions To be successful in any market you need to be able to compete and this is where Bing falls short. In order to make this search engine more successful Microsoft needs to come up with a more sufficient business strategy. They need to figure out where they best fit in and differentiate themselves from other companies.

They also need to figure out their goals, and objectives, which will make it easier for them to target their users. If they were to apply their business to the VRINE model, they would quickly notice that their search engine is replaceable and has no ways to set their company’s search engines apart from others. I believe they are taking the right steps by trying to offer different options on their website but I think they will need to do more since they do not offer the same kind of links that Google does such as Gmail or Google Maps.

I think that while Mark Penn is focusing on making Bing better in the market share area and the rest of Microsoft management needs to place a strong focus on finding innovators that can help Bing become a major competitor once again. Title- Can Mark Penn Fix Microsoft’s Bing? Date-7/23/2012 Website-http://www. forbes. com/sites/petercohan/2012/07/23/can-mark-penn-fix-microsofts-bing/2/ Citation-Cohan, Peter. “Can Mark Penn Fix Microsoft’s Bing? ” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 23 July 2012. Web. 09 Nov. 2012. .