Slashdot Mirror
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."
... but we make it up in volume!
Which is....ummmm.......
Can I get back to you?
"We are Samurai, the Keyboard...Cowboys"
The main problem with Bing is that you can't really use the world as a verb like you can with Google. Think about it - you can't say you're going to "bing" something, it just sounds gross.
"We are Samurai, the Keyboard...Cowboys"
Oft-times I'll know exactly what I'm looking for, or even the exact site I want to go to, and going via google is often faster than remembering/typing a URL. I know my search result will be top, as I know what to search for. This is far more hit and miss with Bing.
This does change over time, however. It used to be the case that if I wanted a review on a new pair of speakers or a motherboard or whatnot, I could google the product with the word review in the search, such as "b&w 683 review". Whilst for that particular search you'll find some good reviews do pop up first, for a lot of products its an ordeal trying to find decent reviews. Often it'll be a sales page where you can drop your own review, and more often that not they're blank. Its becoming more and more difficult to search for professional reviews, so for many products I go direct to specialist review sites, such as tomshardware for computer stuff.
I seem to have run a little off topic, but my point is that all of this is far more difficult to accomplish with Bing than it is with google, so I'm not surprised they're losing money - they've entered a marketplace with an inferior product (at least for the casual home user), and that's rarely a profitable move.
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).
This is the easiest question around. We all know search engines save info on us when we use them. Who do you trust? Micro$oft or Google. Every time I ask this question everybody says "Google." Bing will never get past this question.
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.
iFind: Apple tells you what you want instead of what you think you want to find.
Table-ized A.I.
Oddly, one feature Bing beats Google on is that its API has a much more generous license, allowing you to use results in non-user-facing apps like scripts; to reorder or filter results or mix them with results from other sources; etc. Google's API only allows you to republish its results, unchanged, within a user-facing app, basically nothing much more complicated than including a "Google results for this term" sidebar.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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