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."
sure we lose money on every deal... (Score:5, Funny)
... but we make it up in volume!
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How much of those losses involved the large volume of advertising they've put into Bing?
Re:sure we lose money on every deal... (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Your flat operating costs - in this case, how much bandwidth you need to crawl the web to index things. The cost of employing staff to maintain, write and keep your search engine alive.
2) Your variable operating costs - in this case, how much extra bandwidth you need to supply your results to users, how many servers you need to keep that sort of thing.
3) Your marketing investment - which is also a variable and how much you spend will depend on how quickly you want to catch the market leader with your own product. How much do you need to advertise and market your product for people to say, "Well, I might try to bing this search rather than google it." The more users you want quickly, the larger the campaign you need to invest in to get these users quickly.
The problem is here that from what the community at large is saying, while some have tried it, they haven't been happy with the product to continue using it. That means that while the money is being sunk into point 3 above, it's not retaining those users, so much more needs to be spent to get them to try it again.
To really compete with a market leader on a world stage such as this, you really do need a great product - so many people wouldn't be using google if any kid with a garage could write a better search engine - and you need to invest a LOT of money into an advertising campaign - unless you aren't worried about the length of time it takes to reach the market leader in terms of share. You can grow slowly, through word of mouth, through organic growth - or you can grow through buying other search engines, redirecting searches, striking deals to have users sent to your platform over competitor products. The more customers you want, and the quicker, the more pricey it gets. Just be sure that you aren't throwing money hand over fist into GETTING those customers if you aren't going to keep them.
Way off, there (Score:3, Interesting)
Google has declared over $30 billion [yahoo.com] in tangible assets for 2009.
They even paid more than your $1.5 billion estimate in income taxes in 2009. [yahoo.com]
Frankly, I even think that Google has enough money to develop a competing OS and eventually displace Microsoft from their position of control in the OS market, but I don't think that they're at all interested.
Re:Way off, there (Score:5, Insightful)
Google has made an OS however. No one is taking is seriously because it it basically a web browser. And while Microsoft and others are busy talking about the Cloud, people forget that Google is sitting on this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client [wikipedia.org]
What happens when users don't need to install apps or worry about security so much because apps can just run natively in the cloud in a sandboxed instance? You just access them from the web, and they just work.
Then suddenly that simple, secure OS that Google made becomes vastly more interesting.
Competing Isn't Cheap (Score:3, Insightful)
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I could see Microsoft carving themselves a slice of the online market - perhaps not large enough to make an impact though. Having Google spread its self over so many fronts helps their cause.
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The problem with claims about the quality of M$'s online stuff, is the double speak inherent in those losses. Most of those losses are driven by advertising costs, M$ paying other online and old world media companies to advertise the quality of M$'s advertising but if M$'s advertsing is so good why are they spending all that money advertising else where.
The reality is that the aggressive M$, dog eat dog, prove your profit basis, employment conditions, marketing, where accountants and lawyers take total p
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No shit, he said, forgetting to post anonymously.
Re:Competing Isn't Cheap (Score:5, Funny)
Some people enjoy Colonoscopies [wikipedia.org] too.
I'm just sayin'...
Re:Competing Isn't Cheap (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Competing Isn't Cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
That is, much of the money that they do manage to make, they make by cannibalizing MS server products sales. Now, I'm sure that they'd rather cannibalize their own server product sales than have Google/Amazon/assorted 3rd party penguin swarm datacenters eat them, cannibalism beats starvation after all; but that is still sort of a depressing mandate.
Their only "greenfield", so to speak, revenue opportunities are search(at which they are fairly tepid) or in providing "the-first-hit-is-really-cheap, also granular" access to various MS services(Exchange, Sharepoint, MS SQL, etc.) to tiny outfits that can't afford to do them in house(and, given SKUs like Small Business Server, we are talking pretty small outfits).
not just online services (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:not just online services (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows development was completed with XP. Since then Microsoft have been looking for reasons for people to upgrade. Before XP the next release was always better than the last.
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Re:not just online services (Score:4, Insightful)
...until Office drops support for XP, that is.
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Most small offices I know of are still using office 97-2000. MS would have to cut legacy support for office 97-2000 from their own products to really cripple small offices.
Re:not just online services (Score:5, Insightful)
Eh? Since when has Microsoft supported their products in more of a token manner?
What will ultimately kill XP, and the older applications which run on it, is new hardware (or rather, old hardware that dies necessitating its replacement).
But honestly, MS doesn't want to outright kill these products. They'd rather have people using them than something non-MS. They want them around filling a segment of the market - and they're not going to die for decades, anyway - for one reason or another. What Microsoft is really concerned about is corporations and large companies upgrading to the latest, greatest: those companies and licensing is Microsoft's bread and butter.
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Such as ? Who would make a hardware product without XP support and instantly lose all that market ?
Apple.
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7 boots faster, but requires more CPU and memory than XP. It is not faster on the same hardware.
It is significantly better than Vista largely because they fixed the broken video driver API in Vista. Aero, gaming and anything that needed accelerated video in Vista performed horribly.
Re:Competing Isn't Cheap (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Competing Isn't Cheap (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I don't like Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Google has shown in the past that they care allot about protecting they customer information
While Microsoft has shown in the past that all they care about is making things theirs
where a failed attempt to make the internet Microsoft compliant rather then open to all things OS by sticking to their own standards instead of W3C.
No thanks, I'd choose Google any time over MS
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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 im
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Which is pretty much directly in competition with Google. Google has had their Docs platform out for years, and personally, despite thinking at first that it was neat, but useless, I've basically converted to Google Docs for all my personal use (naturally it's still "real" MS Office at work).
Very little of what I do in such documents is private/sensitive information - heck often it's stuff I'd like to share. It's also often stuff that I want a backup of. Google Docs provides me with access to those docume
Re:Competing Isn't Cheap (Score:4, Interesting)
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What surprises me most is this.
Time and again MS is trying to enter a market, only to sustain huge losses in the beginning. Now 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. An
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Re:Competing Isn't Cheap (Score:4, Interesting)
One large problem is the bright folks at Microsoft can't innovate on anything that could possibly lead to a loss of revenue of Windows products.
Of course. That is an issue. Though it seems they do invest a lot now in on-line services, including real improvements to IE's standards compliance.
On the user interface field they are being taken over on all sides by Apple and even Linux. There is so much innovation done there - MS doesn't have a proper touch interface to compete with the iPhone/iPad OS, for example. Of course MS has their legacy - there is no reason not to keep the old interface and allow the option of a new experimental one. Maybe even a few experimental interfaces. Let the power users find them and try them out - and listen to what the market thinks about it.
I strongly believe that it is not the underlying hardware that counts any more (yesteryear's is more than good enough for 99% of us - save hardcore gamers and hardcore CAD developers and so). It is not much the OS that counts any more (it just has to work, stable and secure - who cares what's under the hood), it is just the user interface. And there is no reason why MS can not do anything good there.
Computing is moving on-line: the browser is getting important. MS seems to understand this.
Computing is also moving more towards hand held devices. Like the iPad. MS is missing out on this.
Desktop computing as we had it will remain - the basic office work and gaming and web browsing on the "big" screen. MS is strong there now, but with the experiments going on in their competitor's products it is only a matter of time before someone finds the holy grail of desktop user interfaces and the competition really takes off. The Windows technical lock-in (mainly MS Word) is slowly dissolving already.
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.
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It's not about competing. They're trying to buy marketshare. If they spent $713M into making a good product (and they know how to do it) by being honest for once, they'd be in the black.
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Because... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Because... (Score:5, Insightful)
I often thought that Yahoo and Microsoft just violated the KISS rule. Yahoo.com comes from the "web portal" days of AOL and seems determined to die with it. Bing.com, to their credit, seems to have learned the lesson finally that people like Google's minimalism and just slaps a background image on it to differentiate their service somehow, but I don't like their results that much and what they do well isn't that different from what Google delivers. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
Unless Bing starts behaving like Apple and delivering what I don't even know I want yet, I don't see it heading much anywhere.
Re:Because... (Score:5, Funny)
iFind: Apple tells you what you want instead of what you think you want to find.
Re:Because... (Score:5, Interesting)
Oddly, one feature Bing beats Google on is that its API [bing.com] has a much more generous license, allowing you to use results in non-user-facing apps like scripts; to reorder or filter results or mix them with results from other sources; etc. Google's API only allows you to [google.com] republish its results, unchanged, within a user-facing app, basically nothing much more complicated than including a "Google results for this term" sidebar.
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Ha, this is great, I never noticed this before, but it is so true. You have a header, usually a grahpic that stands out from the rest of the page, and a page of results.
They should stick to what they're best at (Score:5, Funny)
Can I get back to you?
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hey! I've heard their gaming consoles are good. (I don't own one, but....)
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The ones with massive failure rates that cost Microsoft boatloads of money?
They are quite popular, but they still aren't making money for Microsoft. If you're still losing money two generations into the console business, you're doing something wrong.
I think the company that will eventually kick Microsoft's butt in this arena is neither Nintendo (different niche really) nor Sony. Apple tried a gaming console once and failed miserably, but it was basically a computer platform with no developers.
The iPhone/iPa
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Eh? Music Players like the Zune? They're not even selling that outside the US, to show how much confidence they have in it.
And the Xbox is competing only with the PS3; the Wii has blown both away for "this generation" of consoles, despite being hardware essentially from the previous "generation", and the Red Ring o' Death issues go without saying. Hardly something I'd hold up as something they're best at.
Luckily... (Score:5, Funny)
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Their marketing people are BRILLIANT!
Clash of titans, watch the fallout (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it's important to consider the unbelievable forces involved -- nearly limitless funds on both sides. How many companies would like to take in the amount Microsoft casually loses? How much did they lose on Xbox in the beginning? When the rich guys go at it and it feels good that the rest of us pick a winner, what about the other companies that should have been contenders but couldn't buy admission? What Microsoft decides it wants, it tends to get. One of the government attorneys involved in the antitrust suit commented that they had legal resources that rivaled the Department of Justice.
The Google/Facebook conflict is another one to watch. I don't think Google has abandoned Buzz by any means, and Facebook is really pissing off a lot of people these days.
In all cases, don't linger on the losses they're having. They can afford it.
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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
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I don't think they'll succeed, either; but I also underestimated them in the Xbox thing. Maybe even Zune will succeed someday.
What I guess I was hinting at is my desire for SOMEONE ELSE to enter the fray. Of these characters I like Google the best, but I don't trust them either. Facebook I think it going to do themselves in, they're getting too hard to use. The "privacy settings" thing is ridiculous. But I also think they have a few years left before power changes hands.
I know Google is approaching FB
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Interesting you bring that up. There is not a single quality console out there because those unbelievable forces can afford to lose so much money in the process, and it provides a huge barrier to entry in that market.
It's also worth keeping in mind that Microsoft lost so much money on the XBOX360 in warranty repairs that could have been prevented by a minimum of QA it could have fu
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Which I find rather strange. The judge (or an expert) should clearly have seen that the video was doctored -- lying in a courtroom is a jailable offense! Why did nothing happen?
Of course, using that reasoning I still don't understand why nobody is in jail over the Sony rootkit; if one of us had done it, the outcome would be clear (PMITA).
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Most judges and many attorneys aren't very technically sophisticated. I don't know what happened but my impression was that the whole thing was mishandled - and then Bush was "elected" so it all went away.
As for lying in court, that happens every day. They all had their eyes on the prize, not the sanctity of the process.
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How much did they lose on Xbox in the beginning?
Are they making money on the XBox now? I thought that had been pushed off by all the defective units.
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It's important to note that other companies are taking in Microsoft's losses. Sure, those companies are law firms, manufacturing, grocery stores, and myriad others, but every dollar that Microsoft loses ends up back in the pocket of someone else. A big loss for a company that can afford it is just the thing to help bring up the economy!
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Even Windows CE/PocketPC/Mobile/what-ever is a $10+ billion loser and they just got shut down by Android and the iPhone. There are a few other areas where they tried t
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I agree they've been inept and they tend to "extinguish" things they get their hands on. I think they'll lose this largely on the merits - google does a good job. Also google has committed surprisingly few of the dick moves like happen with Facebook and msft; but can we count on that ?
What I want is a little(r) guy to have a shot at the title. Normal companies can't compete with cash firehoses and I think it stifles new stuff. Also I think at some point google will go evil or incompetent.
The way I see it (Score:5, Funny)
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Bing'er? I hardly know'er!
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I'm not surprised Bing are losing (Score:5, Interesting)
Oft-times I'll know exactly what I'm looking for, or even the exact site I want to go to, and going via google is often faster than remembering/typing a URL. I know my search result will be top, as I know what to search for. This is far more hit and miss with Bing.
This does change over time, however. It used to be the case that if I wanted a review on a new pair of speakers or a motherboard or whatnot, I could google the product with the word review in the search, such as "b&w 683 review". Whilst for that particular search you'll find some good reviews do pop up first, for a lot of products its an ordeal trying to find decent reviews. Often it'll be a sales page where you can drop your own review, and more often that not they're blank. Its becoming more and more difficult to search for professional reviews, so for many products I go direct to specialist review sites, such as tomshardware for computer stuff.
I seem to have run a little off topic, but my point is that all of this is far more difficult to accomplish with Bing than it is with google, so I'm not surprised they're losing money - they've entered a marketplace with an inferior product (at least for the casual home user), and that's rarely a profitable move.
A modest experiment (Score:2)
Problems... (Score:3, Interesting)
Google isn't getting any worse and Bing just isn't innovating in any meaningful way. Trying to promote Bing is like promoting alternate keyboard layouts, even if it -is- better, any benefits will be lost in the fact that people have to re-learn something. Google isn't just a search engine, its a bookmarking engine. Its a lot easier to remember "nexus one review" than http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/04/nexus-one-review/ [engadget.com]
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 X
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If you're going to call someone out - at least provide a modicum of supporting evidence.
Microsoft's quarter was not really all that great. (Score:2)
I love Bing (Score:2)
... when I want to use the cash-back feature. But I've usually used Google to narrow down my purchase first.
MS may not care all that much (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft does have a bit of history of sinking large amounts of money on totally losing projects, and there have been suggestions that it may be partially intentional.
The poster child for this is Internet Explorer, which was developed and handed out free, for a 100% monetary loss. Various people have suggested that the intent was never to charge for it. The motive wasn't profit; it was control. The idea is that they wanted to control the "browser market", which included killing any startup that wanted to make money on a browser. They succeeded at that, and even the most critical reviewers agree that MS still controls at least 2/3 of the browser "market". From a power viewpoint, IE has been a real success, even if it has been a money sinkhole. It gives MS control of a large part of how the Web works in reality. It has especially been an effective tool at scrambling all attempts to develop rational standards and interoperability.
The only people who consider this a "loss" are those who believe that money is the only corporate motivator. Those who understand a desire for power and control find it easy to understand why corporations like Microsoft would sink so much of their profits into such losing projects.
It's entirely possible that MS's ongoing attempts to get into the search "market" is something along the same line. It may not matter to them how much money they lose, as long as they end up in control, with the insignificant startups all bankrupt and standards irrelevant because Bing is the de facto standard and doesn't interoperate with anything they don't control.
In particular, their main motivator may be all the information on our searches that google is collecting. Imagine what Microsoft could do to the world if they had control of all that information.
(Of course, some of us are starting to worry about the effect of nice guys like google having all that information. And maybe it'd be prudent to not worry about it quite so publicly. After all, google does know what you've been googling ... ;-)
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You seem to be a little confused. Power, Information all means more money. Microsoft gave away IE so they could control the internet, which means more money. They can control the homepage, search engine, create the most popular brower, create the dev environment which server pages (ActiveX, .Net)... and more, to make more money.
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MS is like the US a few years back. More money than sense, more money than opportunities. MS knows that it can spend until it's kills off the competition, and when a conservative administration in white house, can buy the executive branc
Hey Microsoft, make a TV (Score:2)
Self-destructive behavior of corporations (Score:5, Interesting)
For some reason, corporations seem to feel the need to compete in areas where they're clearly outmatched no matter what. So we'll see Google, Microsoft, Apple and whoever else steps up to the plate slug it out for a chance to lose millions chasing a train that left the station years ago.
Bing is a prime example of this kind of dysfunctional behavior. Microsoft has even gone to the extreme of paying people to use Bing and they're still not going to make it. In the world of web search, Google has years of experience doing it and they're getting better every day. Microsoft can't catch up no matter how much money they throw at it - in the final analysis, the general public reaches for Google when they want to search. I suppose Bing can slug it out with Alta Vista and Yahoo! for the "also ran" prize. If Microsoft would put all this money and effort into improving the things they're strong in - but no, we'll suffer along with bug-ridden Windows and Office while Microsoft chases the Google butterfly.
Google is doing it too - diverting resources from their core competency to compete in operating systems. Android looks like it has a chance because the competition phoned in their submission (Windows CE, WTF?), but the Chrome OS will be fighting an uphill battle all the way. It's good, but not as good as Sugar and that's a non-starter. They can park the wreck of Chrome OS next to the burned out husks of BeOS, Next, AmigaOS, and others in the scrapheap of history. That doesn't mean they won't "sell" a bunch of copies - but taking Microsoft on in the OS space is every bit as insane as Microsoft taking Google on in the search space and in the end it'll all count for nothing.
Right now, Apple has arguably the best cell phone OS in existence. It's much more polished than Android and - Windows CE doesn't count. Windows Mobile 7 is vaporware and while the demos look great the reality when they finally ship copies is almost certain to follow their past performances and be a giant disappointment. Apple doesn't have a free ride in this mess either - they're caught up in that "We sold a lot of units so we must be something special" nonsense. They're going to have to stop thinking they're superior and get busy; iPhone was very nice, but the competition is working on their game and despite their constant attempts to fail one of them is going to get it right one of these days.
The next few years should be very interesting. From here, it looks like Google will continue to own web search (and advertising) and Microsoft will continue to own operating systems and "office" applications. Apple, despite their desperately dysfunctional leadership will be worth more than either one (if not both) of them - only because they avoided throwing money away trying to bury Google or Microsoft. But they're not immune from the need to destroy themselves - watch the news and see what kind of lunacy they take part in as their superiority complex becomes blatantly obvious.
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For some reason, corporations seem to feel the need to compete in areas where they're clearly outmatched no matter what.
That's the way the global economy works. If you aren't growing, then you are dying. However much you have today, it's not enough... you must have more.
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For some reason,
\
Not for some reason, for the most obvious reason. These companies make large amounts of money. They can either invest it in the bank, but flowers for everyone on the planet, or TRY TO MAKE MORE MONEY BY INVESTING IN OTHER AREAS. I am confused why so many people seem not to understand this. Microsoft did it with Xbox, PocketPC, Bing. Apple did it with iPod, iPhone, iPad. IBM did it with the IBM PC, consultancy. Amazon did it with selling to other markets. EVERYBODY DOES IT, BECAUSE IT IS FU
Just imagine how different the world would be (Score:2)
Just imagine how different the world would be if Microsoft heeded the advice of its own research arm - Microsoft research. Back in 1999-2000, MSR researchers were chomping at the bit to create a search engine (which at the time would have been FAR more advanced than anything else on the market, including Google). All they needed was budget and a "go ahead", the motivation was made abundantly clear to the executives. Ballmer said "no".
Fast forward five years, and in about 2004-2005 Ballmer realizes that he's
Balance in the Universe (Score:3, Insightful)
Good thing for Microsoft employees (Score:2)
Bing OK, Bing deal with Yahoo not so much (Score:2)
If you read the entire Business Week article, it turns out that advertising revenue is up 19% at Bing. What's killing them is the Yahoo deal, which is apparently a money drain during the cutover. Microsoft's "online services" also include other MSN-related things, including their declining dial-up business.
It's too early to tell how this will unwind. Microsoft is patient. Bear in mind that the original XBox lost money through its lifespan. Only now is the gaming operation moving into positive territo
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: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.
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Mmm, tried it, didn't like it.
Let me say I can happily use vi all day. I also think that nethack shortcuts are intuitive (well, maybe not - but I like them).
The thing is a document viewer has different input requirements to a document editor.
Vimperator is cute, but I can't shake the feeling it is a joke taken too far. Something like the unixkcd thing, only the neckbeards coding it forgot to include a punchline.
Besides, firefox implements "/" for page search so I'm happy.
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Not here, AC, I just tried. Maybe in Windowsland (TM).
But come now, did you really need to hide your identity for that?
Re:Bing was a stupid idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually Bing has some features that outclass Google Search. Image search is so much better on Bing because it's dynamically loaded so you don't have to page through 20 times to get a full view of what's out there.
It would be nice if Bing, Yahoo, or whoever grabbed 30-50% of the search market. Microsoft scares me, but so does Google.
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:4, Insightful)
LoB
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Not only that, but also features that disappeared.
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Why have you been using it from the beginning, because it returns better results (which was simply not true in the beginning, but it has gotten better over the months), or because you are a MS fanboy? I can't think of any reason that you would jump on it so quickly.
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They should have named it "Poly". Then we could access it with Mono API's: Mono + Poly = ....
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Old grannies playing BINGO in a Bingo hall
Rule 34.
No exceptions.
One Bing to rule them all.