We’ve written before about how Bing is trying to turn search into an app. Instead of forcing you to wade through a ton of blue links, when you’re looking to buy a movie ticket or make a restaurant reservation, for example, Bing surfaces a widget that lets you complete your task right there and then.
Microsoft’s purchase of Skype Tuesday could help push that vision ever forward. How often when you’ve searched online have you really only been looking for a telephone number? For customer support, so you can get help for a tech problem? For a hotel, so you can arrange for them to put a crib in your room?
And yet today, when you find that phone number in search, you probably have to still pick up your phone and dial by hand. How much more convenient would it be for you to be able to click on that number and simply place the call right from your computer (or tablet, or smartphone)? (Google is already making that happen in some cases.)
As Bing increasingly focuses on enabling search to "help you complete tasks," rather than simply "find stuff," that communication piece becomes an important part of the user experience. And now that it has Skype, Microsoft can complete that part of the puzzle.
As Microsft CEO Steve Ballmer said in a press conference Tuesday morning, "Everyone in the network and communications business knows the key to business acceleration is innovation in new scenarios. Our opportunity to do that together has been enhanced,” he said.
COMMENTARY: Most of the articles out there about the recent Microsoft acquisition of Skype , the leading voice-over-internet telephone service, were critical of the acquisition, including myself, but I felt it was a good fit with their video-conferencing and desktop and enterprise collaborative applications. The highlighted paragraph above is really starting to make sense now, especially if BING's strategy of "helping you complete tasks" is to come to fruition. It makes perfect sense, and now gives BING access to 663 million Skype users worldwide. All of them use search engines, many of them probably use Google, but this could be an important piece that has been missing from search engines. Microsoft now has a great opportunity to exploit those 663 millin users, not only on BING, but on their other applications, mobile devices like the Microsoft Phone 7 and a social network, perhaps?
Courtesy of an article dated May 11, 2011 appearing in Fast Company
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