It’s interesting how major Internet players will try to out buzz each other with their respective announcements. When it was announced earlier this week that Microsoft is set to launch its new search engine Kumo, now officially called Bing, we didn’t hear anything about Google’s Wave Project. And so instead of taking the limelight, Microsoft’s announcement of Bing was over shadowed by the Google Wave. Putting aside the competition issue, what exactly does Bing and Wave has to offer?First, Microsoft’s Bing is being marketed not just a search engine per se, but more of a discovery engine. It aims to consolidate vertical search engines that include travel, shopping, news and …. It doesn’t really say whether Bing will replace the current Windows Live Search engine, but the way I see it, it might soon be the case.
Bing is not just a search engine or a discovery engine. It is also going to be Microsoft’s web product branding. In fact, Microsoft is set to start rebranding some of its web products including Microsoft Virtual Earth and the Cashback program will now be called Bing Maps for Enterprise and Bing CashBack Program. Bing is scheduled for public release on June 3.
Google Wave on the other hand is a rather more vague concept. According to the Google Blog:
Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.
In other words, Google Wave is a combination of email and IM with a dash of Google docs’ collaboration features and some social networking functionalities.
In addition Google Wave is composed three product layers – an HTML 5 app layer, a platform and Protocol.
So, which of these two announcement seems more promising? And which have the potential to become a viral success?