Microsoft Has Lost $5.5 Billion On Bing Since 2009

Landing on slashdot for the first time, MightyMartian writes "According to CNN Money, Microsoft has lost $5.5 billion on Bing since its launch in 2009. But it gets even better. If you include Microsoft's other online offerings, all the way back to 2007, the losses are somewhere in the neighborhood of $9 billion. But not to worry, analysts expect Bing to become profitable in 'three to four years.'"

Comments

Re:Not so sure that Bing makes M$ money elsehwere

[MightyMartian]

That's Microsoft's big problem. There's nowhere to go but down...

Frankly, I think dumping 9 billion bucks into your online offerings and still not being able to shake an any substantial way the market leader, no matter how you measure it, cannot be referred to as a successful strategy. I suspect that, if you include all of Microsoft's expenditures all the way back to its original MSN portal back in the Win95/Win98 days, the amount of money it has spent is far more than nine billion dollars.

Re:It's an investment.

[ynp7]

Microsoft "stick" to what they started? Seems to me that they throw out shit all the time. Bing is a perfect example of where they also throw out customer-facing services. Just a few years ago it was "Live Search," which failed terribly as a brand, so they threw it out and started paying people to use Bing to pump up their search rankings.

You may also remember Microsoft Zune and Kin. Perhaps you blinked and missed those?

Or maybe you just notice the Google ones more because, like me, you find them more useful and thus actually feel the impact when they shutdown a project.

Re:Don't forget Amazon

[Riceballsan]

You seem to be underestimating the time bing has been around, it was launched on June 3, 2009, it's already been bleeding money for 2 years straight (and that's of course pretending it didn't exist as livesearch for years before that), and profitability is still not in visible reach yet.

Win8 IE+Bing lock-in will succeed

[kirkb]

I fear that the Win8 metro shell will do a very good job of locking people in to IE and Bing. They'll both work "good enough" to prevent people from seeking superior alternatives. Will you even be able to swap out the browser in the metro shell? How much effort will it take to modify Chome, Firefox, etc to be metro-compiant?