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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's only a Two billion dollar a year money pit. But at least that investment's making a dent on Google, right? Um, no. Wow. That is an amazing. What qualifications do you have to have to run a business like that? I think I could do that.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
And instead they bought Intragam, possibly the only product/site in existence that is actually stupider then Bing.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
FaceBing: It should have happened :-(
Bing is better in some ways than Google and folks are starting to notice. Microsoft would be stupid to abandon it.
Play Command HQ online
Ahhh, the Microsoft Shill again...
How could Facebook not buy Bing? Just look at the Instagram acquisition - Facebook isn't interested in such trivialities as "profitability," right?
I don't get the part about testing the waters with women. I didn't know they were any good for that.
Six months ago, I logged from where visitors to some of my Web pages came. I was particularly interested in which search services were crawling my Web site. I am now completing a similar logging.
Six months ago, Bing had completely replaced MSN as a crawler; MSN did not crawl my selected Web pages even once. This time, I am again seeing MSN crawling my Web site.
Does this mean that Micro$oft is reverting back to its prior search service and abandoning Bing?
How much did they offer Facebook to take it off their hands?
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?"
You may like to read:
http://slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/186252/ask-slashdot-my-company-wants-me-to-astroturf-should-i
This is Slashdot. Analogies involving women are invalid. Please use cars instead.
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.
Not sure if that is correct to say of Google. They seem to ditch most of their products before they even launch so they have no real idea how profitable they would be.
Isn't that the right time to ditch a product? If you don't think it's going to work out, it seems much better to ditch it before you launch it.
For sale:
Hole in the ground. Sucks massive amounts of your money into oblivion every month.
Price 2 billion dollars, or best offer.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
What is this thing women you speak of?
I don't get the part about testing the waters with women. I didn't know they were any good for that.
You just throw them in and see what happens. They squeal if it's too cold, scream if there are too many sharks, etc.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
what you actually use that? its kind of ironic that you change the default on a default ... I was honestly surprised when a co-worker fired up IE 9 on my computer while I was away, I sat there for a brief moment and thought someone installed firefox 3!
If they melt too acidic...
What? Doesn't everyone have this problem?!
Facebook is one of the few sites with the resources and hit count to actually have a chance against Google. Not to say it would have worked, the implementation, combined with Bing's ahem "quirks" would make it an uphill battle.
But instead the sage Zuckerberg proved himself to not be the visionary the media paints him by buying a brain-dead obvious "innovative" flavor of the week app (apparently cheap filters and basic image processing + built in camera FTW) with no patents, innovations, or profits. Let me introduce you to the (richer) Shawn Fanning of our decade 2010's.
We used to call ideas like facebook and Napster clever uses of existing technology presented in a way that finally opened the door to normal people. A noble achievement worth a paycheck. Now we call them the basis for Fortune 500 companies and the pinnacle of tech innovations. NASA and real science is just too boring and no matter how many buttons I push my microwave can't make my food come out in sepia.
No offense to the people who work for Instagram the product is fine, just that it's overvalue raises serious concerns about the state of progress. There is not a single thing that is new or better about the product than PC software for decades other than it runs on a pocket computer. imagine telling the people at Bell Labs, Xerox, Honeywell, IBM, or one of the dozens of other real innovators in the 70's that shit like this was what drove our current technology economy. They would laugh, then cry, then ask about the flying cars
Oh but I forgot it runs on a smartphone! Meaning that according to the patent office these are whole new uncharted realms of innovation worthy of the legal protection akin to the lightbulp or the the CRT. Prior art? Now a days whats considred inventive is just shifting and existing idea wholesale from one screen or interface to another. To me in a sane marketplace Instagram is worth about a $1 plus whatever assets and minus whatever debts they have incurred.
Oh well then, off to design my new protected innovation the "Hello Welcome" door-mat based browser. And don't you dare libel it me by suggesting it is in any way similar to PC browsers since Mosaic in the 90's. Can you control your computer browser with your fucking foot? Yeah that's what I thought- invent something as revolutionary and lifechanging as browsing in the the elements from your doorstep 20 feet from your PC and maybe we will talk BTW.
You won't believe what I've got up my sleeve next (assuming you have been in a coma since the death of real R&D focus in the West).
Testing women? Where can I apply for that job? ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Or she could be a witch!
If she melts, you have to throw a puppy in as the tiebreaker.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
It's like saying you love your car and remarking how no other car can even come close, but you go on several test drives periodically, and you're not fooling anyone.
I can see that. More and more people I know are spending more and more time on Facebook - Mostly just idling watching the status updates and stuff scroll by. I can even see it with people who are long time visitors to some of my forum web sites. These are people I know and have known for years. Lots of times I see them "idling" on both one of my sites and Facebook. The face of computing to the world is changing significantly which, in my opinion, is why so many people are now buying "appliances" such as iPads. I don't have any numbers, but my bet is while more and more people are "going online" every year, people are searching for things less and less in search engines such as Google and Bing. This isn't so much true of people here, but rather the population of the world in general want Twitter and Facebook (both to me are pretty useless). I'm not saying I think search is dying a fast death, but I do think their relevance to most people is slowly fading.
Silly execs. They should have unloaded it on eBay.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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?
I'm sure Microsoft would be most grateful if you repeated this line of horseshit at the next shareholders meeting.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Google launchs so many products, they prefer to clean the list early on, before it gets too messy.
--
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
No. But "Overrated" seems to be
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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Everything is all right. He talked about testing the waters of women. He must be some sort of a scientist who keeps our mothers safe.
There's been a steady stream of new user accounts, usually with "Tech" in the name, posting lengthy pro-Microsoft/anti-Google posts with the same timestamp as the story itself. None of the accounts are subscribers, so the comments are clearly pre-written. The writing style is similar. The comment is promptly upmodded to +5 before slowling falling to something else. The user's karma eventually gets borked, and a new account appears shortly thereafter. Some think it's "bonch", but I'm not so sure.
I'm sure shilling goes on in many places, but this particular person is so obvious and persistent that it gets really obnoxious.
and on who's face ? Gotta catch on with the latest slang...
Microsoft is trying to sell its "perpetual money-losing" product to potential client. Unbelievable, Microsoft has a sales team !
Have it both ways: She loves my automobile
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Maybe the women you are testing. My wife and I quite enjoy diving with sharks.
Can we use Game of Thrones? My parents won't buy me a car yet, and the comic book shop isn't hiring the bearded right now.
They should have just slapped together a quick photo posting app, maybe given it the option of applying a few filters to said photo and then tried to sell them that.
Well, they're more buoyant...
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
Isn't that the right time to ditch a product? If you don't think it's going to work out, it seems much better to ditch it before you launch it.
I would say it's better to test the product if you can by putting it on the market. I can't remember more than a few of 'industry analysts" who thought the iPad would succeed the ay it has. At best they thought it would play a distant second fiddle to the the iPod/iPhone. Now the iPad has overtaken the iPod as the item chosen by first time customers and Apple sold 15 million units just in 2010. Sometimes products will succeed despite the opinions of long time observers and industry experts including you own.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
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
Facebook politely declined
I would have expected "Fuck, I wouldn't take that money-losing shit if you paid me".
Why Facebook would want to buy the Zune of search engines?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
So, you voted for Kodos eh?
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Well, I hear that you are no longer running for president. Now, please turn your supporters towards paul.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Oh, I think that they would be happier if he would repeat to the press and google. If he says it often enough, it will be believed.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why is this still on insightful, mod this guy down already. He is a shill or a troll.
Actually, up until page took over as CEO, google had many of their projects around with loads of support for longer than bing. They were truly long-term focused. However, none of the projects got the money that bing got.
Schmidt's approach was to have numerous projects and see what stuck to the wall. IOW, he was trying to allow projects to happen in the same way that Google search was done. Page is now cleaning house. It remains to be seen what will happen. I think that he is trying to focus all on search and android. So, many of those with web projects that are being gutted, may actually re-deploy on droid. But it is hard to say that is the case.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That's jail bait. No thanks!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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.
I give you.... ...the Microsoft Kin!
Launched May 13, 2010.
Discontinued June 30, 2010.
Now that's what I call long-term thinking!
I coulda made millions betting against it the second it came out. Anyone ever try to use a search on a MS site before like say support.microsoft.com? lol...they never could do search
will work for dragon quest localization
Dang shill, ya ALMOST had me but then ya had to go and completely blow it with marketing speak. BTW someone needs to save this guy's post and when someone screams "Shill!" because they disagree with a position? Then you can just trot out this guy's post to show them what an ACTUAL shill is.
Anyway i'm sure that someone will point at the dig at Google as a giveaway? Nope, maybe he just don't like the company, maybe his account got burned, that can be explained away. No what can NOT be explained away is these two lines " wide array of other services and software like Azure" and " strong brand name and are also a division of innovation".
Seriously who the fuck talks like THAT, anyone? it reads like something you'd be forced to sit through in some middle management PPT, usually followed by a few buzzwords like synergy and six sigma.
So I'm sorry but all those guys upmodding this guy's post might want to read the language in it a liiiitle more carefully, as the language is just a little too buzzworthy, unless of course this guy wants to admit he works in a marketing firm in which case carry on.
Oh and for the record i'm actually using Bing Search this month just to check it out and to see if that whole "Bing Rewards" thing is worth messing with, since yahoo royally fucked up their search design with the last update. Its alright, can't really tell any change in search quality either way, and I'll be the first to admit their wallpapers are pretty and I actually like their image search a little better but all in all not really a huge change and I guess more of a taste thing really. as for TFA most likely any deal would have given them access to all that yummy FB data, which is of course why Google tried to get into social with Google+ as FB is getting insanely huge amounts of data on folks, and they give it for free because they don't think and all their friends are there! I bet Google and MSFT both slapped their foreheads and said 'Why didn't I think of that?"
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
As a matter o fact, I did some regular test-driving in the past - it ruined my marriage, by the way.
What? A car? I never owned one...
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Had you ever considered moving to Guam?
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Yeah, MS is doing just great.
Why just 4 years ago, apple was 1/2 of MS's revenue and Google was 1/4. Now, Apple is double MS's and Google is 1/2 of MSs.
And you really think that MS is doing great? Seriously? You have not taken notice of the fact that much of MS's revenue is from price increases on western sold, while decreasing prices on all other locations? Even with that, their unit sales are dropping, not increasing.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why a tiny island? Their Internet must suck too. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Nice try MS shill...Your very blatant act of trying to mildly discredit microsoft shills does not erase your history of anti- MS competitors comments.
Teachers, dude. Teachers!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Microsoft lost the email market to Yahoo. They lost search engine market to Google. They lost the instant Messaging market to AOL. They lost gadget market to Apple. They lost the Music market to Apple, Pandora and Spotify. They lost the cloud storage to Amazon, Google and Dropbox. There Hyper V is loosing to VMWare. There Terminal Services is loosing to Citrix. They lost there Accounting Software to Quickbooks. There Office Suit is getting a run for its money with Oracle Open Office. Microsoft time to Adapt or die.
http://thetechnologygeek.org/
I used to find 'Microsoft Maps' quite useful, and easier than some to post on websites. But since they called them Ping, or something equally stupid, I haven't been back.
I work at Microsoft, fairly high up. I can guarantee you this story is bullshit.
Meh teachers. I don't want more school/home works! :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Hairyfeet is a lot of things but "shill" isn't one of them. Save it for the real thing.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Straight from venture capitalists mouths to Google's ears... http://www.canrockventures.com/fail-often-fail-fast-fail-cheap/
I8-D
I'd guess that has more to do with the fact that the Xbox 360 is approaching 7 years old and the market is saturated. Didn't all the major players post a reduction in sales last quarter, even Nintendo?
Once the new Xbox comes out, provided they don't fuck it up with some anti-used game bullshit (among other things), I'm sure they'll be raking in the dough again. In all honesty, I thought that Xbox Live, with it's (imho) high fees, was going to be annihilated by Playstation Network, but Sony completely shit the bed in so many ways there (What good is a free service if it fucking sucks?), and Nintendo really doesn't seem to give a shit about building a real online community, so I'm sure that XBL will be making them a pretty penny and will for a long time.
pfffft. shill.
Of if it breaks, you're about to be a daddy.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Facebook will pay a billion for something as useless as Instagram and yet won't even touch Bing. That says it all really.
I'm as anti-MS as anyone here, but I think this is a little much. Just because one service is less popular than another doesn't mean it's "dead", it just means it's less popular and (probably) less profitable, but it can still be a money-maker. Let's look at cars: Toyota, Honda, Ford, BMW, Mercedes, etc. are all still out there competing with each other. Honda, for instance, is smaller than Toyota and Mercedes, but you don't see them saying "we've lost the car market" and throwing in the towel. They're still competing and making money just fine. Same goes for Suburu, and the really small makers like Lotus, Ferrari, etc. There's room in any market for multiple competitors, even if one of them is leading the market.
Last I checked, Hotmail was still doing just fine. I still see tons of people using hotmail email addresses. Heck, I still see lots of people using aol.com email addresses, even though I have no clue why they do.
Bing is still a viable search engine. Yes, it's much smaller than Google, and I wouldn't trust its results on anything Linux-related, but a fair number of people actually do use it.
The phone market, however, they really should throw in the towel on IMO. At least Hotmail and Bing seem to have more than 10% marketshare each, maybe, but WinPhone7 consumes vast resources and is bombing out in the marketplace with maybe 1%.
You're probably right about the music market.
I can't speak to the cloud storage and virtualization markets. Terminal services should be an easy thing however for them since they control the OS and that's rather intimately tied to the OS.
Their office suite (as much as I hate it) is still far and away the winner in the office suite market; I haven't heard of anyone using Oracle OO, though I did notice a while ago that H&R Block uses OO (the Sun version, this was before Orace took it over).
There[sic] Office Suit is getting a run for its money with Oracle Open Office.
You had me going, but you lost me, bro.
I take it that you are either a wall street banker or an Ex-ceo of GM or Chrysler just before they bankrupted?
Just because MS has 17B in sales does NOT make them doing great. Far from it. They are losing market share. They are losing desktop # AND office #. As that drops, they will lose their monopoly. Once they do, they will collapse quickly.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You might think Microsoft can afford to lose more than 2 billions a year on Bing but that can change in a heartbeat. Another "Vista" disaster on the OS side followed by business moving away from Office and the lost will pile on faster than they can write them off.