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Microsoft bing issues and it’s still a struggling search engine and still a white elephant for Microsoft.
Microsoft has been doing pretty good at all those business avenues where it has been at dominant position such as software sales of Windows 7 OS and Office 2010 sales. But when it comes to Online services division, Microsoft is continuously losing more money than ever.
And the white elephant among all the online services provided by Microsoft is Bing search engine. Microsoft has already spent a lot of money in rebranding its old search engine ‘Live’ as ‘Bing’. While launching Bing, Microsoft spent over $100Mn on advertising. Work on search technology and R&D has also taken up a lot of money from Microsoft’s deposits. Microsoft even made a deal with Yahoo! for powering their search technology.
But all of that has hardly resulted in anything fruitful, not because Bing is a bad search engine but Google is still the best search engine available on Internet. Or probably, people are just so used to Google that they don’t have a reason to make a jump from Google to Bing for search needs.
Even though Microsoft surpassed market expectation in latest quarterly reports, online division was the biggest loss maker for Redmond company.
“So what should Microsoft do with Bing ?” answers NYTimes editor in his article . According to NYTimes editor, Microsoft should rather look for prospective buyer of Bing search engine and sell the search business to some other interested player.
Well, in our opinion, Microsoft should never sell their Search business as the fight in Search arena is only between Google and Microsoft, Yahoo! being already out of the race. And with more than 27% market in hand and continuously growing search market share(even though small quantas) every quarter or so, Microsoft is certainly not out of the search game as yet and still has good chance of growing to over 50% of search share in coming 2-3 years.
It does appear that Microsoft may have to bear the burden of losses that Bing is currently responsible for, but Search business is so lucrative that it can’t be thrown away for couple of billion dollars. And Microsoft is sufficiently rich to be able to bear the losses for coming 2-3 years atleast.
Remember that whoever has used Bing haven’t had a bad experience using it. Bing actually does certain things better than Google. Just that Bing is not people’s first choice as a search engine as of now. It’s more of Google’s persistent excellence that’s keeping Bing, way behind Google than its own issues.
Patience is the key for Microsoft as far as Bing is concerned…
