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."

Comments

Who wouldn't want Bing?

[symbolset]

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.

Re:Who wouldn't want Bing?

[whoever57]

It could be worse, you could be the product manager for a product that has gone from almost 40% market share to 13% in about 4 years and looks like it will be the no. 3 player soon.

Re:Who wouldn't want Bing?

[Anonymous Coward]

It worked really well for XBOX too.

There's nothing wrong with taking the view that one day the XBox may get to the position of having a positive return across its lifespan. And it is genuinely a positive about Microsoft that they're willing to engage in longterm plans. But the idea that it has already worked out well is just crap. The XBox project hasn't made back anything like what it's cost.

Re:Who wouldn't want Bing?

[symbolset]

You think that's bad? Try being the boss of Windows HPC. That guy fell of the Top500 entirely. No joke, the last Windows cluster in the Top500, ShanghaiSupercomputing Center's Dawning 5000A went SLES10 and now there is not even one. He must be so lonely.

Re:Who wouldn't want Bing?

[LandDolphin]

What about the less direct effects of people playing on a Microsoft XBOX and having a more favorable view of Microsoft as a brand?

Re:Who wouldn't want Bing?

[Osgeld]

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

Re:Who wouldn't want Bing?

[bmo]

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.

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.

--
BMO

Intragam

[wisnoskij]

And instead they bought Intragam, possibly the only product/site in existence that is actually stupider then Bing.

Re:Intragam

[Eponymous Coward]

Bing is on Facebook's acquisition list though. Bing is just below Zombo.com.

Re:Intragam

[bmo]

Zombo.com is entirely more useful than Bing.

At Bing, you can't do anything.

At Zombo, you can do anything, anything at all, the only limit is yourself!

--
BMO - Welcome!

Re:Intragam

[rgbrenner]

Google also had millions of users who didn't pay anything, with no business model before Schmidt came on board and turned them into an advertising company.

Wow, that's revisionist. Schmidt was at Novell when Adwords was launched.. nearly a year before scmidt became CEO (and 6 months before he even worked at google).

Google does not give away its product for free. Its product is advertising space.

Stupid to Sell

[Boronx]

Bing is better in some ways than Google and folks are starting to notice. Microsoft would be stupid to abandon it.

Re:Stupid to Sell

[busyqth]

Good job.
Now you'll be sure to get the raise.

Re:Stupid to Sell

[artor3]

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.

Re:Companies do this all the time

[busyqth]

I don't get the part about testing the waters with women. I didn't know they were any good for that.

Is MS Reverting Back to Its MSN Search Service?

[DERoss]

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?

Re:Companies do this all the time

[caywen]

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?"

Re:Companies do this all the time

[simoncpu was here]

This is Slashdot. Analogies involving women are invalid. Please use cars instead.

The fundamental differnence between companies

[Grayhand]

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.

Re:The fundamental differnence between companies

[LordLucless]

Take away any two Apple products, even product lines, and you still have a viable company.

Really? Take away iPhones and iPods, and what do you have left? Their desktop/laptop business? Yeah, that's viable, but an Apple that only sold those would be a tiny fraction of what it is now. The massive upswing in Apple's profile was the iPod, and the iPhone built on that. Without those, Apple would just be a slightly-more-expensive Dell.

I agree that Apple is putting out more successful products than Microsoft, but it's focus is still very, very narrow. Cutting out Windows and Office would take out most of Microsoft's profit, but only a tiny slice of their product offerings. Taking out iPhones and iPods not only takes out the majority of Apple's profit, but also a decent chunk of their product lineup.

Re:The fundamental differnence between companies

[Chuck Chunder]

Really? Take away iPhones and iPods, and what do you have left? Their desktop/laptop business? Yeah, that's viable

It was and probably is. And if you took away the iPhones and iPods there's still the iPads where there's more excitement today.
If you actually wanted to 'hurt' Apple you'd take away iTunes. Not because it's a massive profit center in itself but because it's what makes the iPod user buy an iPhone, iPad, Apple TV etc etc.
MS has no gateway drug, they thought they did with Windows (and for a long time that was true) but somehow the world changed and a more frequent refresh of the iPhone line is far more exciting that the tick/tock (bad/good) release of Microsofts OS line.

Re:Companies do this all the time

[hawguy]

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.

Re:Companies do this all the time

[Black Parrot]

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.

Makes more sense than Instagram

[WiiVault]

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).

Re:Companies do this all the time

[antdude]

Testing women? Where can I apply for that job? ;)

Microsoft Tried To Unload Bing On Facebook?

[Black Parrot]

Silly execs. They should have unloaded it on eBay.

Re:Companies do this all the time

[pseudofrog]

Hrm...

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.

Re:Companies do this all the time

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Companies do this all the time

[Anonymous Coward]

TechNY = TechLA = Bonch = Sharklaser = Burson Marsteller = Microsoft = Facebook.

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

Re:Companies do this all the time

[rtb61]

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.