Each of us have only a few really close friends – three, maybe four. The number is so small because the time and emotional investment is so large.
This is the root problem facing Microsoft. I’ve already got a search friend – and his name is Google.
When competing against a juggernaut, you won’t win a feature war and Microsoft’s ‘Decision Engine‘ is just that – a feature war.
Last week, Freakonomics blog posted about a recent study on friend turnover. On average, our friend circles experience a 50% turnover every seven years while the circle remains the same size. In other words, we don’t add new friends incrementally, we replace our old ones.
Most of the time though, a new friend doesn’t tell me to ditch my current friend…rather, I seek out a new friend when its no longer working with the old one.
Microsoft may be able to force searchers to switch over time, because they’ve got the money to invest. In fact, we know that they’re willing to spend at least $45 billion to pull it off (the amount offered to buy Yahoo last year).
Most of us don’t have that kind of money to attack our respective Goliaths. For us, it’s a waste of time and money trying to convince prospects to switch when they are perfectly happy with the friend they’ve got.
Instead, we need to invest passionately in two things:
1. Building great products
2. Investing where the juggernaut can’t: connecting, relating, build relationships etc.
If we do those two things well, we’ll be the first acquaintance that our prospects call when things are no longer working with their existing friend.
I have learned that any fool can write a bad ad, but that it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one. - Leo Burnett