Bing Loses More Money As Microsoft Chases Google 317
angry tapir writes "Microsoft posted strong results for the third quarter of its 2010 fiscal year, largely thanks to sales of Windows 7. But the company continues to suffer heavy losses in its Online Services Division [warning: obnoxious interstitial] as it tries to match Google in the online search and advertising market. ... The division's quarterly loss grew by 73 percent to $713 million, compared to a loss of $411 million during the same period last year."
Re:Luckily... (Score:2, Informative)
Their marketing people are BRILLIANT!
Re:How do I get to Bing? (Score:4, Informative)
There is no shortcut key to go to the URL bar
In IE, Alt-D takes you to the address bar (what you call the URL bar).
click on the search box, but again, there is no shortcut
In IE, Ctrl-E takes you to the search box.
Re:Clash of titans, watch the fallout (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, but they are losing money in a bad place.
I actually worked for MSFT from 2004 to 2007. One of the reasons I accepted employment with them was because it was in their online services division: I saw the days of proprietary software as numbered, and believed the only way MSFT could survive in the long-term was to become a service provider and derive advertising revenue from the brokering of information and monetizing of relationships: basically beat Google and Facebook at their own game because of their enormous financial resources. The reader will recall that MSFT's online division went from a 500 million loss to a 500 million profit in the course of one year.
And, then, they stalled.
You can play the "catch up" game when the first comer has sacrificed stability to be the first comer, and you have enough resources to effectively swamp them while they try to regroup for round two. But Google and Facebook are too far ahead and have too many resources of their own for MSFT to ever catch up.
Further, even while Facebook has privacy issues galore, does anyone think that MSFT would be any better in that regard?
Re:How do I get to Bing? (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox has a good solution too, given that accessing the URL bar is a quick keystroke and then a tab over to enter the search box.
If you think that is convenient, then CTRL+K will change your life.
Re:Bing was a stupid idea (Score:4, Informative)
This CustomizeGoogle [customizegoogle.com] feature saves you from the hassle of paging through Google web search results. Whenever you navigate to the end of the page, you dont have to hit the next button. CustomizeGoogle automatically fetches next set of results and appends them to the bottom of the page.
Re:Bing was a stupid idea (Score:2, Informative)
Xbox In Last Place In 2/3 Of The World (Score:3, Informative)
How totally delusional can you possibly be?
Last gen Microsoft wasted billions only to end up:
Last place in Japan
Last place in Europe
And the console only viable in the US and a few other minor markets
This gen Microsoft has wasted billions only to end up:
Last place in Japan
Last place in Europe
And once again only viable in the US and a few other minor markets
The only thing Microsoft has going for it this gen is a 50 percent failure rate to pad out their worldwide sales total from suckers buying 3,4,5 or more Xbox 360 replacement units.
Re:How do I get to Bing? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Competing Isn't Cheap (Score:2, Informative)
What, seriously?
Think about it. Who would have more to gain by selling your information? Google, because they don't have an actual sellable product other than advertising, and selling personal information ties in really nicely there.
Of the two, who would have the most to lose from such a scheme? Microsoft, by leaps and bounds. People - the common man, even - hasn't trusted Microsoft since the 1990s. Microsoft (a large corporation as opposed to a startup, in most minds) selling personal data is sleazy and immoral; Google doing it is a breach of ethics, but that's business today, isn't it?
*sigh*
Re:Competing Isn't Cheap (Score:4, Informative)
Ugh. Uninformed post rated highly by fanbois...
Time and again MS is trying to enter a market, only to sustain huge losses in the beginning
Yeah, I'm with you. MS Word was a big loser at first against Word Perfect...
ow Bing, before the Zune (ended in failure), the Xbox (lost a lot of money, still alive though, can't imagine it has made them any money overall even if it would be profitable by now), and before I'm sure they lost heaps of money entering the office suite market with OpenOffice, the webmail market with Hotmail, and so on. Only their OS business has made a constant profit it seems. And Office is doing well as well. But that's it.
WTF? Microsoft's model has *always* been:
1) Be the platform everybody else uses.
2) Watch new companies prove business models,
3) Spend the money made in #1 like water to build in the (now proven) business model,
4) Advertise like crazy.
5) Profit!
On the other hand I have never heard about serious losses on Apple's side around the introduction of the iPod. Sure they lost money on some products, but not this kind of numbers.
I guess you never heard of the 1990s?
Sun has likely lost money on development of StarOffice, now OpenOffice.org, but their product is steadily making inroads and I don't think they are still pumping much money in it. If only because they're not such a rich company any more.
Didn't you hear that there is no "Sun" anymore. It's now called "Oracle"... how's life under that rock?
Netscape burnt and died, and from its ashes Firefox has risen. Making heaps of money, going strong, doing well.
Mozilla (the "for-profit" arm of the Mozilla foundation) made about 72 million. [calacanis.com] While not bad, it's hardly "heaps of money" for a product used by too many millions to count. For a comparison, Mozilla's annual profits are roughly equivalent to what Microsoft profits in a single day. I'm not saying this to knock Mozilla particularly, since I type this in Firefox 3.6. But this "heaps of money" thing is just.... you know.
"Competing on the world stage" may not be cheap, but I think it may help if Microsoft starts to develop their own products and their own ideas, instead of an "iPod killer", a "Google competitor", etc. That seems to me a failure from the start.
When has Microsoft done any different? See their business model above. MS's big deal with IBM was a resell of a hackish copy of a the dominant operating system - CPM.
...MS is not exactly a company that is innovative these days.
... or at any other point in its highly profitable history.