Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft To Sell Bing Maps, Advertising Sections
UnknowingFool writes: Microsoft has announced that they will sell some Bing Maps technology to Uber and their advertising business to AOL. About 1,300 employees are expected to be offered positions in their new companies. CEO Nadella said previously that there would be "tough choices" to be made. Some outside analysts have said neither venture was very profitable for Microsoft and may have been unprofitable at times.
that Bing maps is a failure, how will Microsoft compete against Google in the search business without maps? Will they integrate Google Maps results to Bing?
As much as I hate Microsoft for all the crap they've pulled over the years, Google should have competition. Without competition they'll become......well, like Microsoft.
Table-ized A.I.
Sounds to me like Microsoft's famous corporate infighting is cutting off its nose to spite its face.
Display advertising is almost complete fraud now. MS can't make enough to support their bloated infrastructure and they just give up (bye bye 1200 jobs).
Specifics of the deal said this would make Bing the default search provider for AOL for 10 years instead of Google. Google still has around 64% of the search market, but numbers seem to indicate that Microsoft is gaining ground on them with 20% market share. Rik van der Kooi, vice president of Microsoft’s ad business, said Bing is a self-sustaining business, or "sustainable and standalone." https://fortune.com/2015/06/30...
The headline is horribly misleading. Microsoft is absolutely not selling Bing Maps. They are selling the team that has been gathering street-view imagery. The companies haven't released many details on the deal, but you can imagine that since Uber already has a fleet of vehicles driving around they could pay drivers to capture this imagery while delivering people and save a fair bit of money.
The ones sold to Uber are lucky since I hear Uber is looking for some more executives for their office in France.
Also consider that in most markets, Windows Phone is closer in phone marketshare to iOS than iOS is to Android. That's not saying a lot. But WP is definitely at the #3 spot, and the way this market is... if they can find that itch to scratch, things could change within the course of two or three years.
I disagree - that is saying a lot. And none of it is good. The first horse past the post was 4 lengths ahead of the second, later the same day horse number 3 dragged itself across the finish line - but, in two or three years that horse may win the Melbourne Cup!!. Maybe stick to your day job, you wouldn't last long as a bookie. Tizen, Sailfish, RIM, and Firefox (and possibly Ewebuntu) are all competing for the same low-end market sector as M$ - I seriously doubt any change in strategy by M$ is going to improve their chances. Either they totally change their business model to take on the high-end device market - and take market from the current leaders (unlikely), or they go even lower (sub $20 instead of sub $50) and take market share from that market - kind of hard to do when they pin their income on apps sales while their competition in that market either don't - Firefox/Ewebuntu), play in all the walled gardens (Sailfish - which isn't really the low-end market), or play in the Great Walled garden where M$ has no traction (Tizen, probably sell a lot more phones than Gartner and ITC report).
To "scratch an itch" (like, um, Open Source), they need to find an unsatisfied market - and not fuck things up. Given their track record... I guess it depends how much more money they have outside the US that they need to invest (flush down the toilet) locally. (lucky for M$ they do hold Apple stock) [/cynic]
When Apple wanted to double down on their iPhone platform they kissed Google off and built their own Maps and Advertising solutions. Regardless of whether they were good solutions or not, it's clear the aim was to create a complete ecosystem. Microsoft followed a similar tack for several years, investing heavily in their own Maps and Advertising systems. Now that Microsoft are selling them (or part thereof), this indicates that Microsoft is no longer interested in a complete ecosystem. Therefore this raises questions about their plan for Windows Phone.