Google recently accused Bing of copying its search results. Plenty of comments have since poured forth supporting both sides in this debate. Irrespective of which of the two was right, the rest of us, especially if you are involved in product development or product management, can learn a couple of things from this episode.

Never Relax at the Top: Google is the clear leader in search technology and has a commanding lead over Bing. Nevertheless this episode shows that Google takes its competitors very seriously. It appears that an entire team was involved in the project to track and analyze Bing’s results. Google clearly spent quite a bit of its resources trying to show that Bing was ‘copying’ their results. If you are in product development, what have you done recently to track your competitor’s technology? Are you confident that your technology will maintain the edge over your rivals’ products? In the fast-moving technology industry it helps to be paranoid.

Don’t Hesistate to Learn from the Leader: I do not buy Google’s argument that Bing has been copying their results. At best, one might make the argument that Bing was not clear about the way it was gathering data. In fact, for me the important observation from this episode is the way Bing has been using Google to improve its technology. Bing’s engineers seem to have calculated that they can improve their product by using data from how users interact with their competitor’s product. This kind of thinking needs to be encouraged. After all innovation does not happen in a vacuum and many of the best products are built from improving older technology. What has your engineering team learnt from your competitors’ technology?