It may not be illegal or 'cheating', but it's incredibly stupid for the same reason cheating is: Without the person you are cheating from, you can't pass the test!
In the case, the customers don't get relevant results unless other potential customers use the competition! In short, Bing's results are only good if Google is popular.
Why would you invest time relying on your competition? Shouldn't you be striving to match or beat them, rather than trying to piggy-back on them?
Isn't this just the McDonald's v Subway/Burger King example? McDonald's has the research and foot traffic. Rather than do your own, watch where the successful McDonald's go and then put your restaurant across the street.
If you have a bunch of users searching for "XYZ" on a different search engine and consistently going to link A -- wouldn't that imply it was relevant? You'd do the exact same thing for searches on your own search engine. The only difference is people have opted in to allowing you to have this info _implicitly_ by going to your search engine vs giving you this permission _explicitly_ by clicking through the EULA for the toolbar.
Indeed. Drucker somewhere makes the point that a business's key activities are innovation and marketing -- which implies you don't necessarily have to be innovative in your marketing, just good at it. Hmmm... I was just thinking that rather than do my own exhaustive search for startup companies to invest in, I'll just check who has gotten support from Y Combinator and offer them a deal, piggybacking off of Paul Graham's work. Wait, it's been done? Oh, never mind.
As a practical matter, I doubt customers will care so long as they've always had the option of turning off that part of IE's behavior. I mean, when did you last care about the authenticity of your phone directory's information?
That sounds all well and good, but in terms of cost vs. benefit, it's way easier to make a good application by stealing the years of hard work of the industry leaders than it is to reinvent everything and try to come up with your own clever tweaks to improve it. If you could do it without getting caught, it would practically be a no-brainer.
Yes but it is one thing if a small startup does it, and its another if a giant like Microsoft does it. In a way its applying a double standard, but i think Microsoft has enough money to invest is innovating in search space. Ultimately you can't really prove its illegal, so its a matter of ethics. Strangely we would all encourage a startup to copy what it can, so it can focus on the core innovation and not be bogged down, but we look down on Microsoft. Why is that?
Kind of indicative of where the internet is heading these days, a few big platform players which everyone else is piggybacking on. Like Windows Live Messenger attempting to stay relevant by combining facebook chat with it's own network.
In the case, the customers don't get relevant results unless other potential customers use the competition! In short, Bing's results are only good if Google is popular.
Why would you invest time relying on your competition? Shouldn't you be striving to match or beat them, rather than trying to piggy-back on them?