What a catch 22, though. If your interface is too different from Google, then you face the objection that everyone wants a simple, familiar interface. If your interface is too similar, then you’re dismissed as irrelevant.

I’d like to believe that substance matters at least as much as perception. Back in the day, Google didn’t win because of perception; it won because it offered a noticeable improvement in results quality. And even today, while their result quality in general doesn’t strike me as particularly differentiated from that of its competitors, I’d suspect they still have an edge on content freshness.

As for the $100M in ad spend, I agree. I shudder to think how much they have spent on marketing the Zune.

Kumo does seem to be taking a similar approach, at least in as much as one can glean from that article. That is, less is more.

However, as time goes by I’m increasingly skeptical this approach will illicit enough of an immediate “wow, that’s different and better” response to get people to seriously try it out. I thought (and think) Duck Duck Go looks a lot different than Google, but many people still find a way to believe it looks the same. Whether this is all psychology or not (i.e. it really is different or not) is irrelevant if it isn’t perceived as different enough.

I’ m also skeptical that the $100M in marketing will help get the point across unless they have actually broken that psychological barrier. Ask.com tried that amount of ad spend in the past, marketing a “different” looking search engine as well. And look where that got them…