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NY Times: Microsoft Tried To Unload Bing On Facebook
benfrog writes "According to a blog posting on the New York Times site, Microsoft tried to sell the perpetual money-losing Bing to Facebook 'over a year ago' (the article cites 'several people with knowledge of the discussions who didn't want to be identified talking about internal deliberations'). Steve Ballmer, apparently, was not involved or consulted. Facebook politely declined. Neither Microsoft or Facebook would comment on the rumors."
Bing was better for a while, though the "M$"-hating manchildren would never admit it. But by now? No. All of Bing's best features have been copied by Google. Improved image search, preview panes, flight statuses at the top of results, bird's eye view in the maps (not to be confused with satellite view), the list goes on. And that's a good thing. That's how competition is supposed to work. But Bing hasn't continued to innovate. And their other big advantage -- a relative lack of link farms -- has faded. So now they're no more innovative than Google, their results aren't any better, and their market share is stuck around 15% (30% if you include Yahoo). Meanwhile Google's Android platform will ensure they continue to grow. If MS is counting on windows phones to drive traffic to Bing, they're going to be disappointed.
I'm glad Bing existed and forced Google to add new, useful features. But unless they make some big improvements, they're never going to come even remotely close to pushing out Google.
It's called, "Please take us seriously as a search company! Oh BTW, we're shopping our search engine around. Any takers? Anyone? We're gonna beat Google! Seriously, though, guys, how about $1.5B? I'll go as low as $1.2. Cmon. Hello?"
What's killing Microsoft is the lack of viable products. Take away Windows and Office and Microsoft would cease to exist. Take away any two Apple products, even product lines, and you still have a viable company. Microsoft has a string of failed products while Apple's track record for the last decade has been excellent. Sure there have been a few failures but most have simply failed to perform like Apple TV and not outright disasters. The Zune may not have been a total failure but it hardly set the world afire. Xbox has done well but it wouldn't keep the company afloat if it lost Windows and Office. Windows and Office have largely hit market saturation which has lead to ten years of stock stagnation. Until Microsoft comes up with a break out product the company will continue to stagnate. I'm not an Apple fanboy it's just Microsoft has retreated to the safety of two successful product lines and rarely does anything to shake things up. The biggest shake up will be a new Xbox model but to put it into perspective what are the sales numbers on Xbox consoles? 66 million to date so maybe 1.5 billion in console sales. At best we're talking a few billion in sales not profits. Apple has 110 billion in cash on hand. Microsoft needs another Windows or Office level product to get competitive again and nothing is on the horizon.
see this is what I dont understand about business at that level, EVEN IF bing is a 2 billion dollar a year money pit (which I seriously doubt) why not cut it? Its not like companies have cut products before, it happens all the time ..
But in the computer industry there is this HUGE factor of pride of being 100% right 100% of the time no matter the cost. Shit happens, cost go over, nothing is perfect, but for fuck sake at some point its time to kill the white elephant that consumes too much and only produces shit.
So what Microsoft, you renamed MSN to BING and bundled a bunch of crap into LIVE, no one used it, no one uses it, when do you actually look at whats happening ... its only been 20 fucking years of the same bleh
This is why Microsoft should have been broken up by the DOJ instead of overturning Jackson's ruling.
Microsoft, back then, had stump ponds full of management deadwood. They use their profitable departments to shore up their epic money losing departments. If the company had been broken up by major departments (OS from User Software, for example), we probably wouldn't see what we see today, that is OS and Office holding up every stupid money losing project ever in Microsoft. Stupid money losing projects should be spun off to sink or swim on their own or closed down.
But what we have today is not only just a few stump ponds, but entire swamps full of deadwood where investor money and profits go to rot, increasing the amount of gaseous emissions coming from Redmond to compete with the amount of hot air emanating from Ballmer's mouth.
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BMO
They don't cut it because it's more complicated than the Microsoft bashers let on.
Microsoft builds search for enterprise, a space where it is very successful, more popular, and a darned site cheaper than Google's offerings. Bing is Sharepoint search for the public, sure it isn't really taking any market share, but that doesn't really matter, because they're getting the kind of test volume which you can't do for in internal product. MSN messenger is the same deal. Microsoft makes no money off of it, but they make a crap tonne off Exchange and Lync which use the same technologies.
The whole purpose of Microsoft's on-line services division is to get people used to the Microsoft interface and get additional testing data for their enterprise products. Hell, Google search doesn't actually make Google any money either, it's a portal for their advertising business.
Folks on sharepoint will tell you that Bing sucks(it doesn't, though it's not as good as Google), and that since it's not taking market share from Google it must be a failure. They'll tell you that Microsoft jumped into the Search business because they feel they must because of Google, none of which is entirely accurate. No one makes any money on internet search, they make money on advertising associated with search and right now, Google has online advertising totally locked up. Making money on internet search is however, not the only reason for having a search product, or a messaging client, or anything else.
Yeah, this TechNY was much better when he was TechLA. That is until that shill account got modded to death. How long will this one last?
1) Long comment with same timestamp as story
2) New user id
3) "Tech" in username
4) Dig at Google ("Google is desperately trying to do with Google+ and failing")
5) Dubious, at best, praise for Microsoft ("always thinking about long term strategy instead of quick gains", "Microsoft's and Windows' strong brand name")
Ugh...shilling is laaaaame.
Well, Microsoft is one of those companies that only think long term. In fact, most of what Google does is to gain quick profit and ditch the projects that fail with that. Just see how many projects Google quickly and silently cancels compared to Microsoft.
Maybe Google is "thinking long-term" with Google+? Shouldn't you be praising that instead of divining it a failure so quickly? It is, after all, much younger than Bing. Perhaps all of Google's non-profit-generating divisions are "supportive" divisions? Google has had many services that didn't pan out, but Microsoft has many, many more. Your thesis that "Microsoft thinks long-term and Google doesn't" is a real stretch.
And for all their efforts, what has Microsoft's supposed steadfast commitment to the long-term given them? The XBox has turned out to be profitable (I believe), but most of their revenue still comes from Windows and Office, just as it has been since long before Google was born.
This comment was brought to you courtesy Waggener Edstrom, a Microsoft marketing partner.
By that logic, any forum on the internet that contains a comment that doesn't bash microsoft must be a "paid posting". Jesus you trolls are ridiculous.
Besides which HTC is also their client. I guess now we know why there are so many android "fans" here on Slashdot. They are all paid posters. Right?
They're still trying to earn their dirt money.
This discussion is contaminated. Treat all commenters here with contempt for being involved with such sleazy sly tactics.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-12/facebook-enlists-pr-firm-burson-marsteller-to-pitch-google-privacy-story.html
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-05-12/tech/30002042_1_burson-marsteller-burson-marsteller-facebook
Bing is positively ancient, a Ballmer driven marketing name change to boost his ego is meaningless. A One stage MSN search (Live search) was number 2 to Alta Vista and then both M$ and Alta Vista choked the chicken by flooding the first pages with utterly pointless paid for placements. They were so bad at it, you started a search and the immediately click on page 5 or so of results. All of this before google and of course this created google's market.
Ballmer was stupid enough to say at one stage he regretted ever starting MSN just because he was screwing it up all the time. Reality is MSN should be worth more than Google, and it is the true measure of Ballmer's incompetence.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen