4 ms·

Fascinating article. Take away for me above everything is that search is going to change, significantly. Deploying the lighter model sounds like a mistake to

Fascinating article. Take away for me above everything is that search is going to change, significantly. Deploying the lighter model sounds like a mistake to me regardless of margins.

spion 4y ago
Agreed, deploying the lighter model seems like the quickest way to leave a bad impression. Wonder if doing a slow "exclusive" rollout with invites (like with gmail) would be better from a marketing perspective
jillesvangurp 4y ago
I think the mistake is actually conflating the use cases here. Google has a nice lucrative business model with search. AI offers new business models on top of that. Some of these are going to be extremely valuable to users. To the point where companies might charge users for that and get lots of users to pay up. The mistake here is assuming the business models will stay the same (i.e. free usage supported by ads). I think that's a mistake. The second mistake is assuming people use search engines to answer questions or generate content. They might. Or they might just be looking for a particular web page or article. The former is kind of a new use case and business model. The latter is what Google is already doing quite well. If I were Google, I would make this a paid feature with an initially generous freemium layer to lure people in and try before they buy. That would allow them to control the pace of rolling this out and allow them to focus on not having to cripple the experience. MS is doing this indirectly via office365 and teams, which are already paid features and by partnering with OpenAI. Bing is a relatively minor business for them at this point so they can experiment there without risking much. MS is not going to be able to absorb most of Googles users anytime soon. My guess is that even MS does not believe that is actually going to happen. What might happen is that a lot of early adopters will come along and then find their way to their paid products. From a revenue point of view that seems like a good plan to me. The issue with Google is that right now they are just responding to what MS is doing. They don't seem to yet have a coherent strategy of their own beyond just coasting along on ad revenue.

Fascinating article. Take away for me above everything is that search is going to change, significantly. Deploying the lighter model sounds like a mistake to me regardless of margins.

spion 4y ago

Agreed, deploying the lighter model seems like the quickest way to leave a bad impression. Wonder if doing a slow "exclusive" rollout with invites (like with gmail) would be better from a marketing perspective

jillesvangurp 4y ago

I think the mistake is actually conflating the use cases here. Google has a nice lucrative business model with search. AI offers new business models on top of that. Some of these are going to be extremely valuable to users. To the point where companies might charge users for that and get lots of users to pay up. The mistake here is assuming the business models will stay the same (i.e. free usage supported by ads). I think that's a mistake. The second mistake is assuming people use search engines to answer questions or generate content. They might. Or they might just be looking for a particular web page or article. The former is kind of a new use case and business model. The latter is what Google is already doing quite well. If I were Google, I would make this a paid feature with an initially generous freemium layer to lure people in and try before they buy. That would allow them to control the pace of rolling this out and allow them to focus on not having to cripple the experience. MS is doing this indirectly via office365 and teams, which are already paid features and by partnering with OpenAI. Bing is a relatively minor business for them at this point so they can experiment there without risking much. MS is not going to be able to absorb most of Googles users anytime soon. My guess is that even MS does not believe that is actually going to happen. What might happen is that a lot of early adopters will come along and then find their way to their paid products. From a revenue point of view that seems like a good plan to me. The issue with Google is that right now they are just responding to what MS is doing. They don't seem to yet have a coherent strategy of their own beyond just coasting along on ad revenue.