Infinite Path

It’s a simple formula in the business world; when you offer a service or product in a market dominated by one major brand, which has spent years earning the trust of millions of users across the globe and has in fact become synonymous with the actual industry it is involved with, you focus on doing the simple things correctly.

Competing against the name which comes to everyone’s mind when they think of the industry which you’re trying to make money from isn’t easy at the best of times but most companies know not to shoot themselves in the foot by making basic errors.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, this simple rule was ignored today as their search site Bing disappeared from the internet. You could almost hear the top dogs at Google rubbing their hands together in glee and sharing a chuckle as it emerged that the site was absent from the web for almost half an hour.

An official statement from Microsoft revealed that the outage was the result of a “configuration change” made to the site during testing. The outage, which resulted in users receiving error messages, was subsequently described in the same statement as an “unfortunate” consequence.

The fact remains that the fall-out from this occurrence has been relatively minor. The blogosphere has not exactly been lit up with talk of Bing and its problems, whilst technology writers for newspapers and media outlets haven’t been called upon to drop everything and provide their opinion on the topic. Whilst this is positive for Microsoft in one respect, you can’t help but wonder how the internet would have reacted to a similar outage from Google.

Such is the popularity of Google that even an outage which lasted half the time of Bing’s would be enough to catch the attention of a vast number of online users, whereas most people still don’t know that Microsoft suffered such an issue.

Microsoft have their work cut out trying to make Bing a realistic and respected rival to Google and errors like this aren’t the way to go about it.