Microsoft Bing, Don’t Forget About The Rest of Us
I was very excited when Bing went live and was dissapointed that to use the new functionality I had to change my region to United States. Three months later and still no change on bing.co.uk which is dissapointing. I thought they would have started rolling out to other regions by now.
Since launch of Bing we have seen developments such as BingTweets which displays “real time” search results from Twitter alongside Bing search results. This is a great tool which I often use out of curiosity, not in my day to day business like other Twitter search tools.
Recently Bing Visual Search Beta was released. Great! Oh no, none of this is relevant to me! Even the iPhone app prices in Visual Search are in US$. Apparently more Bing updates are on the way.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not having a go at Microsoft, I love the search stuff they are doing. My point is that Microsoft are developing a habit of leaving everyone else out of the picture when it comes to new product and feature releases.
The same applies to Xbox Live updates for Xbox 360 users, the United States get Netflix and the UK gets crappy, overpriced, not so new movie rentals. There are plans to integrate Sky TV into Xbox Live, but it’s hardly Netflix is it? I undertand that Netfix is limited to the US, but Sky? I think we can do better than that.
To really take on Google, Microsoft needs to roll out Bing in other regions quickly and with a lot of hooplah. Or at the very least leat the rest of us know whats going on.
Maybe Microsoft has missed the boat on this one. First impressions count, and many non US users may not come back for a second look.
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