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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.
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
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?
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?"
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.
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
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).
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.
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?
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.
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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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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/