Our friends at Microsoft are at it again with a re-branding of their Live Search engine, now to be called “Bing”. The only reason I know about it is because they have a hot girl smiling about it in almost every Hulu ad of late.

I haven’t used it yet, so I have no idea if it’s better or worse than Google, but I do know that the whole reason that Google is so popular is that they came along with a better mousetrap and better customer relations in a climate that was begging for it, and it’s going to be hard to dislodge people.

For all those years we had to deal with Microsoft abusing us as consumers. They sold to businesses, so they had little use for style, design, or reliability. It was a little like allowing IBM to pick your wardrobe.

Of course, you could go and get yourself a Macintosh, but at the time Macs were in sort of an adolescent phase and had long hair, not to mention earrings in strange places. You could get away with that stuff in the art or creative worlds, but not in an insurance office.

It was very frustrating to me personally. There was really no good option.

Then the internet came along and everyone went bananas. They’re still pretty much going bananas but we’re starting to get our heads around it, I think.

All of a sudden, everyone had a voice and they all started shouting to one another at once. It was cacophony. How in the world would we find anything amidst all this clutter? Well, there was Yahoo and AskJeeves and Lycos, but they really just kinda listed all the chaos. They helped some.

Then some folks calling themselves Google came along and made a search engine that ranked results based on how relevant they were. I mean, all the other guys did that too, but the Google system really worked. It was so amazing.

At first, only nerds used Google. I whipped it out once in front of two of my clients sometime in 2001 and one said “What’s Google?”.

“Hacker search engine,” the other said, knowingly.

So, in a sea of formless chaos and search indexes that didn’t work worth anything at all, Google invented one that did. And what’s more, their pages were not cluttered with blinking banner ads and popups. They respected their users. What a concept… a better mousetrap, delivered by someone who actually gave a damn.

Needless to say, everyone fell in love with Google, and the hits just kept on coming. They did the same trick with Gmail. Yahoo mail and Hotmail didn’t know what hit them. The big boys got burned again by not bothering to respect the consumer or deliver a reliable product.

So here we are years later, still getting abused by Microsoft with Xbox360s with a 30% failure rate, browsers that don’t properly render HTML, and somehow they think they can challenge Google, the people who have always treated us like gold.

The nerve!

Anything is possible, and Microsoft certainly has the money to develop good products. They just don’t really seem to be innovators. Maybe the climate will force them to change. It’d be nice.

For now it’s really nice to watch them feeling the sting from being jerks for so long.