To Bing or not to Bing?

Focusing on Microsoft's dilemma over how it can compete against Google in a market that Google now solidly owns, blinds one to the bigger problem facing anyone trying to do business on the Internet today, including Microsoft: No one really has a clue as to how the damned thing works.

Arguably, Google may be closer to discovering the clue than anyone. But its clever marketing tactics, which lead the technology press to cover color changes to the Gmail toolbar and the shifting of department names from the bottom to the right side of the corporate logo as strike-up-the-band events, indicate to me that Google is just as indecisive about a viable long-term business plan as everyone else. It's just better at masking that fact.

Google has built its empire on cleverness. Its very name is symbolic of its approach to business from its outset: Throw all available resources at working the problem, until a solution eventually sprouts forth someplace. It isn't an efficient approach to business, but like a password-cracking algorithm, it doesn't have to be. Besides, who else is going to not only come up with a better solution but fund it, manage it, advertise it, and nurture it to health?

Cleverness shrinks in the face of genius. Since the advent of the Web, there's been a palpable anxiety over whether someone in his basement laboratory would stumble upon (to borrow a phrase from a former Google competitor) a realistic formula for long-term business success, that would trump everyone else's clever ploys. It's like the Grand Unified Field Theory -- it's a formula that people believe exists out there in the ether, unwritten. Except that in this case, it's probably simpler, and that gives people cause for concern.

You see, the big problem with the Internet as a medium is that it really hasn't been designed yet. No one knows a way to build a service that is useful and reliable that people will continue to need and want for the foreseeable future, and build a brand around that service. In lieu of a real formula, publishers have come to rely upon the fickle finger of Google for their livelihoods, to steer some fraction of this nebulous mass of traffic in their general direction. And since Google itself doesn't really have a programmed technique for executing this primary business function of the Internet, the task of guessing how Google obtains prime placement for search queries and high-level placement for stories in Google News, or how it obtains the relative value of phrases in AdWords, has become a cottage industry.

It is this field of uncertainty, of not knowing how this thing really works, that gives Google its power. Through no fault of its own, Google is a socialist empire. It thrives upon the equal distribution of resources among its vast multitude of loyal citizens. The New York Times clamors for space alongside The Boy Genius Report in the daily war for territory on Google News, the modern era's Pravda. (This while the real Pravda competes for aggregator space too, with headlines like this from today: "Dog gives birth to mutant creature that resembles human being.") It sets the value of terms, phrases, and concepts on a scale that masquerades as an open market, but whose own customers are never given a clear picture of their dynamics. And it espouses a dogma of equitability that's soothing and appealing to a populace in the throes of a revolution.

But the Internet revolution is ending, and everyone knows it. In the absence of revolution, it takes more than a clever messaging authority to lead an empire. It's time for a capitalist approach, and who knows where that will come from?

Meanwhile, journalists who have become conditioned to covering the minutiae of search engine marketing and Internet portals, are buzzing this morning about Microsoft probably shifting its emphasis from the meaningless "Kumo" domain name to the meaningless "Bing" domain name. And while "Bing" does have the virtue of sounding more like a viable verb -- I can't imagine myself ever Kumo-ing the nearest dry cleaners -- focusing on the branding problem steers attention (perhaps intentionally) away from the bigger issue: The next great search engine must efficiently lead the seeker directly to what she's searching for, must lead demand to supply, must direct client to server. It must be capable of doing what Google, even throwing more servers into its infinite mix, has cleverly avoided ever having to accomplish: simply answering the question.

It could, if it were engineered to do so, not with brute force but with logic. There's a feeling out there that whoever gets the logic gains the keys to the kingdom.

That's why there's more than a pinch of tension and anxiety over the Wolfram Alpha project: because folks know that Google's brute-force approach to connecting a question to a possible answer could someday be outmoded by a brilliant mathematical solution. If a search engine could efficiently answer the query, "I'm five minutes late to an appointment, what's the quickest route to the venue that passes by a store where I can replace my necktie?" then not only would users flock to the service, but (far, far more importantly) businesses would pay good money to be part of the answer to that question.

Newspapers that are suffering today because they can't transfer brand loyalty to the Internet, and which today depend on gaming Google with superlative headlines to get them by from day to day, would probably gamble a great deal of money toward funding a solution that's more than clever, but genius.

Which brings us back to Microsoft, and the giggles, sneers, and coughs generated whenever the term "genius" is brought up in association or mere juxtaposition with the manufacturer of the Zune. It's never had to display real genius in order to succeed, which could by why many believe that Microsoft could yet be clever -- that it could convince the market that it's closer to a real solution, a real business model, than Google or anyone else.

The reason I doubt it -- at least today -- is the same reason I doubt Google has a mission plan when its blogs boast of the shifting of the words in its logo. When we're too easily led to focusing on the minutiae of the matter -- whether to call it Kumo or Bing or Splong or Fyadqorst -- it's probable that there is no big picture for us to be losing sight of. We're discussing no less than the invention of the wheel, and as Angela Gunn's favorite author Douglas Adams put it in a true work of genius, we're arguing over what color it should be.