Google Bard's $100B PR Blunder
Microsoft's Bing goes all-out Bling. Google's Bard stumbles out the gate.
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It’s been a few months now since a very smart AI chatbot called ChatGPT dropped from the sky like a piano through our living room floor.
If you haven’t heard of ChatGPT you should unsubscribe now, this newsletter’s not for you and that’s totally fine, we can part as friends.
If you’ve tried it you’ll understand. The AI chatbot is fascinating, eerily powerful, amazing, helpful, liberating, far from perfect, very worrying. It feels completely new. A portal into the future.
The company that gave us this tingly feeling, OpenAI, had previously received $1 Billion of investment from Microsoft Corp, you’ve heard of them.
ChatGPT’s immense and sudden success saw Microsoft pumping in another $10 Billion into OpenAI at an eye-popping valuation of $29 Billion.
Part of that investment rationale is to infuse ChatGPT into Microsoft’s products, like Outlook, Office, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel — things that a lot of people use.
And also Bing, a Microsoft product almost nobody uses.
Bing was first released in 2009. During the next 13 years, to Google something became a thing you did, a verb.
Bing became a punchline. Like Kodak.
Like Bada Bing.
But that was Before-ChatGPT (BC-GPT). Now OpenAI is going to change all of that. Bing it on!
Like a Phoenix out of the ashes, ChatGPT is going to Make Bing Great (Again).
This is what must have been on the minds of Microsoft corp PR when they started their press release with the heroest hero messaging for a computer software product, ever.
That deserves a close up.
“The joy of discovery…the wonder of creation.” What is this, the Book of Genesis? Is Bing having its “Come to Jesus” moment?
Speaking of deities, Google, like Zeus, unaccustomed to having its OVERWHELMING DOMINANCE in search and AI challenged, scrambled to release its answer to ChatGPT and kill New Bing in its crib. To do that, it pulled out a shiny awesome almighty THUNDERBOLT called….Bard?
Contrast the tone of Microsoft’s Nadela’s “joy of discovery…wonder of creation” with the understated announcement by Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
This is what Google Image search comes up with for “Bard”.
And here’s The Bard.
Not exactly Zeus God of Thunder Bing Killer.
Google’s comms strategy on Bard seems to be more cautious and humble than Microsoft, whose CEO even went so far as to invite Google to dance.
But that wasn’t even Bard’s biggest problem. Straight out the gate it shoots A $100 BILLION BULLET into its own foot.
[[IMPORTANT UPDATE: It seems perhaps Bard didn’t offer inaccurate information, and may have been vindicated]].
However, the damage had been done
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Maybe Google comms are asking Bing what to say.