Is Microsoft Trying to Become "King of Search" With Cortana Strategy?

New submitter Ammalgam writes: Microsoft recently announced that they were porting Cortana over to both Apple and iOS. This move seems to be puzzling to the larger Microsoft community because on it's face, Cortana is not per se a commercial product. But there is an interesting theory emerging. Windows10update.com is speculating that the insertion of Cortana into other platforms is a "Trojan Horse" strategy that will ultimately have Windows, iOS and Android users sending their search requests to Bing. The theory is that enough of those requests will bring Bing to Google's level.

Comments

So? It's a good corporate move.

[SQLGuru]

A company tries to get their product to be more popular. Sounds like a good strategy. If it works, bully for them. If it doesn't, they'll try something else. Either people will use it or they won't. Bing isn't a terrible search engine......in fact, there are some features that Google buried related to Image search that Bing still keeps up front. Anyone who just uses Google is actually missing out. I use more than one tool to accomplish my task (Google, Bing, and Yahoo plus a few obscure search engines for specialized searches). Each one offers up results that the other doesn't.

Maybe on Android, but not for long

[DrStrangluv]

Having used all three platforms, I don't see the point of this on iOS. Siri is good enough that I don't think you'll get many people to install Cortana, especially as Siri can be activated without having to start an app. Android on the other hand... OK Google hasn't worked as well for me. It's search dictation is fine, but some of those other things that Siri/Cortana can do aren't handled as well by OK Google. I would tempted to install Cortana on an Android phone. But really, if a lot of people started doing this, I have to believe that Google would just fix their own service. It's gonna be a real uphill battle to get adoption across platforms unless one of the other platforms really drops the ball. Maybe if you are a mutli-platform user, you'd want the same service on each device... say you have a surface, you could put Cortana on your phone, as well. Or if you have a Windows Phone, you and Bill could put Cortana on your tablet. And since Cortana is coming to the desktop experience, MS may be counting on that. They could do some tie-in feature so that it works better that way: set something in Cortana on your desktop/laptop, and your phone and tablet know about it. But I still think that's a tough sell.

Re:Maybe on Android, but not for long

[Wycliffe]

Having used all three platforms, I don't see the point of this on iOS. Siri is good enough that I don't think you'll get many people to install Cortana, especially as Siri can be activated without having to start an app. Android on the other hand... OK Google hasn't worked as well for me. It's search dictation is fine, but some of those other things that Siri/Cortana can do aren't handled as well by OK Google. I would tempted to install Cortana on an Android phone.

My experience has been the exact opposite. Having gotten use to google voice search on android, I find siri very lacking.
Now that I own an iphone, I still find myself getting very frustrated with siri not giving me the right answers so I open google
on my iphone and ask the same question and get a much better response from google.

Duh?

[Enry]

That was obvious the second Microsoft said they were porting it. They want to expand their base for their services. MSFT no longer has a desktop lockin that they used to years ago and so now they have to compete on quality on platforms they don't have control over. Remember when Apple ported iTunes to Windows? Or switched over to using USB rather than firewire? Those weren't to make Apple users feel any better about themselves - it was to target a group of people that didn't use their services.