Microsoft Betting on Bing for Mobile Search 204
msmoriarty writes "Bing is a still a money loser for Microsoft, and the calls for the company to sell it off are growing. But according to long-time Microsoft watcher Mary-Jo Foley, dumping Bing is just not going to happen. 'While the world sees Bing as a distant No. 2 search engine, Microsoft brass and bean counters see Bing as a reusable component and asset that will be built into more and more products. Those who think Microsoft will discard Bing or sell it to the highest bidder are dead wrong — that won't happen now or any time soon.'"
Why Microsoft keeps Bing around (Score:4, Informative)
I worked in Bing for a several years as an SDE until leaving recently. The Online Services Division in which Bing resides is losing money at an alarming rate. In the last fiscal year ending June 2011, OSD lost $2.5 billion [techcrunch.com].
Why is Microsoft in this space? I heard it from Bill Gates himself at a team function last year. If Microsoft does not put up a fight in online search, Google will continue to encroach on Microsoft's cashcows, Windows and Office, with their product offerings. I don't think anyone in Microsoft really is driven to make an honest-to-goodness better search experience; Bing is just Microsoft's 70%-Achieved beachhead in online search just to keep Google honest.
Re:With just a 27% share of the U.S. search market (Score:4, Informative)
While the world sees Bing as a distant No. 2 search engine
Yeah yeah, slashdot has the FAQ point about it being US-centric site. But including the word "world"? That maybe true for US, but it varies by country. For example Yandex is the largest search engine in Russia and Baidu is in China, and they both lead Google by miles.
Re:With just a 27% share of the U.S. search market (Score:2, Informative)
I don't really understand why owning 27% of the search market is being shown as a failure.
Perhaps because they don't [hitslink.com] "own" 27% of the search market, or anywhere close to it?
Google has 83.62%, Yahoo 6.21% (not "owned" by Microsoft but I suppose you could see it as rented) and Bing 3.57%.
They may have a larger share local to you but that isn't enough to avoid losing billions of dollars on an ongoing basis. To get anywhere close to Google's market share (and thus hopefully reduce their losses) would take massive gains over what they have now.
Change. The. Name. (Score:4, Informative)
If anything makes me have no respect for Microsoft's search engine, it's the embarassingly stupid name they've given it.
"Google" is fun. "Bing" is childish. And tying it to a trademarked sound is just brand-development masturbation right in the face of your potential customers.
Quit it.