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Bing Loses More Money As Microsoft Chases Google
angry tapir writes "Microsoft posted strong results for the third quarter of its 2010 fiscal year, largely thanks to sales of Windows 7. But the company continues to suffer heavy losses in its Online Services Division [warning: obnoxious interstitial] as it tries to match Google in the online search and advertising market. ... The division's quarterly loss grew by 73 percent to $713 million, compared to a loss of $411 million during the same period last year."
Unfortunately for them, Microsoft's "Online Services Division" has a deeper fundamental problem than merely losing money.
That is, much of the money that they do manage to make, they make by cannibalizing MS server products sales. Now, I'm sure that they'd rather cannibalize their own server product sales than have Google/Amazon/assorted 3rd party penguin swarm datacenters eat them, cannibalism beats starvation after all; but that is still sort of a depressing mandate.
Their only "greenfield", so to speak, revenue opportunities are search(at which they are fairly tepid) or in providing "the-first-hit-is-really-cheap, also granular" access to various MS services(Exchange, Sharepoint, MS SQL, etc.) to tiny outfits that can't afford to do them in house(and, given SKUs like Small Business Server, we are talking pretty small outfits).
I often thought that Yahoo and Microsoft just violated the KISS rule. Yahoo.com comes from the "web portal" days of AOL and seems determined to die with it. Bing.com, to their credit, seems to have learned the lesson finally that people like Google's minimalism and just slaps a background image on it to differentiate their service somehow, but I don't like their results that much and what they do well isn't that different from what Google delivers. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
Unless Bing starts behaving like Apple and delivering what I don't even know I want yet, I don't see it heading much anywhere.
Windows development was completed with XP. Since then Microsoft have been looking for reasons for people to upgrade. Before XP the next release was always better than the last.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Your signature elaborates your decision...
Google has shown in the past that they care allot about protecting they customer information
While Microsoft has shown in the past that all they care about is making things theirs
where a failed attempt to make the internet Microsoft compliant rather then open to all things OS by sticking to their own standards instead of W3C.
No thanks, I'd choose Google any time over MS