Microsoft Lost USD 5.5 Billion On Bing

September 22, 2011 - 3:01am

After looking into the financial results of Bing so far, CNN found that Microsoft's search engine has been losing nearly 1 billion dollars each quarter since its launch in June 2009.

During its first two years in market, Bing lost $5.5 billion, but that's not everything. Looking in Microsoft's older financial records reveals that the company's online services division has been losing money since day one and it has never made any net profits till now.

Microsoft's online services division has incurred total losses of $9 billion since the company started releasing its financial records in 2007.

Microsoft argues that those losses are required temporarily to establish a foothold in the online search market that has been dominated by Google for too long now. The company noted that it has been gaining market share against Google steadily over the last 27 months.

Microsoft's argument is technically correct as Bing now maintains a 14.7% of the online search market, up from the 8.4% it owned at launch. But it is important to note that this market share was not taken from Google which maintains a market share of 64.8% now, only 0.2% down from the 65% it owned when Bing launched.

Almost half of Bing's customers are Yahoo users who use it indirectly since Yahoo is now powered by Bing. The rest of the customers came majorly from Ask.com and AOL deserters.

Comments

Bing will never have a patch

Bing will never have a patch om google. When i use google, i usually find about 90% of the stuff i search for in the firt 3 pages, If i use bing, i usually struggle like hell to find anything useful. I too hate ms for basically sucking the life outta everything they touch, but i do love win 7, i havnt found a single problem with it yet. I really dont see the point in win8, how can it be any different from win7? surely they could just make an update that made win7 more compatible with touchscreens

Everyone has an issue with MS

Everyone has an issue with MS but to say xbox live service sucks is just ignorance, in fact it has blown away every other platform that I have played on, for online multiplayer games in terms of quickness low lag and responsiveness, yeah I am upset that both xbox's i bought broke after about two years each. but xbox live is legit. and halo was so fun that it was almost worth having to buy two xbox's, hopefully when halo 4 hits, halo 3 and reach will come for windows.

...k... the reason people

...k... the reason people hate msoft is because they are ALWAYS trying to monopolize the market, and because their initial OS was made from stolen (in a way) Mac source code. They are trying to squash PS network competition by creating restriction on their own developers to keep them from developing on PS3.Other reasons to hate msoft include (btw I have an xbox and play it more than my PS3, and Wii) -windows Me -windows vista -Running anything off DOS -Inability to secure their systems against melicious software/people... Apple does it, why cant you? -10 different versions of windows 7, most of which restrict RAM use in a system, msoft bassically saying "if you want a nice system, you will pay us a premium that doesnt cost us anything muahahahahah"... nickel and diming you... for 100 dollars a pop. -xbox 360 failure rate of >30%...paying people to rate perfect dark at 9.0 -any windows phone, AND any windows phone OS -Internet Explorer, which copies firefox at every turn -Never doing ANYTHING to advance computing: they havent invented ANYTHING, not even the mouse was their creation -Mandating that msoft runs the servers on 95% of xbox live games, which (unlike your assumption) makes games online slower on 360 than on PS3. -Ruining/milking Halo and alienating Bungie until, Halo 1 + 2 were good, halo 3 didnt have elites (who were the best AI in ANY shooter)... nuff said. -KINECT sucks... ... I could go on.

LoL you need to get your

LoL you need to get your facts straight, Microsoft Windows was created from scratch. Nothing of OSX including its looks were ever used in Windows, the likeness is a result of the fact that as far as OS's go you can't really change their appearance beyond a certain extent. You could argue that OSX is a rip of Microsoft Windows if you want to go that route. Fact remains OSX came out of Unix, Windows NT TCP/IP stack came out of Unix. Under that banner one could also further argue they are both Unix rips in some form or another. The idea of Microsoft being a monopoly is a propaganda started as early as the eighties. A backwater look proposed by the man themselves that being Apple, fact is MS is just another business one keeping itself alive by paying its contributors. Comparing Apple to MS is apples and oranges, they both have separate histories, they both appeal to different computing needs and thus will always remain a constant debate. Your childish bickering is just that childish, not everyone wants a preassembled OEM that carries with it a long bloated TOS just to be used fro rendered services.

Oh yeah...

and maybe those idiots @ Microshit will pull their heads outta their asses & make Halo 2 run on something besides Vista. You know how they're gonna roll though. They'll say ya gotta have Win 7 to play H3 & what is it Win 8 now, (Already? Fucking news to me, but I can't say I'm the least bit surprised.) to play Reach. If they ever do pull their heads out, they can shove their fucking Halos up there.

doesn't surprise me at all.

doesn't surprise me at all. Using *Bing* isn't a great experience. I'm always going back to Google to find what I'm really looking for. Bing as far as I'm concerned is worthless garbage. Most people I know end up going back to Google just as I do so ya no shit Microsoft lost Billions. It's shit just like their ridiculous new Windows 8 Operating system. I can see them losing Billions on Windows 8/ It's the most annoying fucking operating system I've ever used.

Oh god Windows 8...

It's going to be such a piece of shit. Let's make this operating system about using a touch screen! Most people don't have touch screens, but we'll do it anyways, YEAH! It'll have more garbage using up your resources, more security flaws, and nothing new except probably forcing you to have it if you want to use DirectX 13. Oh and of course they are gonna force you to use Xbox Live. I wish some other company would make operating systems that would replace Windows. Seeing as Macs don't play games worth shit and are overpriced media centers, they're just as bad.

well, youre wrong

Macs play games just fine... and they are not over priced media centers. They ARE, the best computers for personal use and come with a full suite of programs. Msoft charges you for their suite of progams (about 200 dollars for office) Apple doesnt. Apple is based on Unix (berkley if im not mistaken) and are much more secure, use theyre resources in a much more effecient way, and do not crash anywhere as often. PLUS PLUS PLUS, with all of the modular components OSX has (work spaces etc) Macs are MUCH better workstations (I worked on one, at Apple) SO....Youre wrong. But they might be overpriced, then again, so are Ferraris.

Meh

I'm with MS on this one $10b is a small price to pay to topple a giant like Google and unless you want to see Google micro chips in your head, supporting anything willing to rival it is a necessity.

Are ya dumb?

If I'm gonna have a microchip in my head I don't want it to be Microshit. I want mine to work right. How often do you think you're ever gonna hear the phrase "just Bing it"? Soon the dictionary definition of "search" will say "Google" beside it. Soon after, Google will replace it.

What?

I'm dumb struck at Microsoft. Really, out of all the suits they have employed no one has realized they can't force us to use there crap when there's better alternatives? Vista, games for windows live, the other two search engines that flopped, ect ect. Microsoft just doesn't want to learn.

Typical anti Microsoft rant.

Typical anti Microsoft rant. How original. Vista was crap. Microsoft realizes that. Hence Windows 7. Games for Windows Live is being removed in Windows 8 and merging with XBOX Live. Bing is actually quite good. People who are too Google happy dont even try and just say GOOGLE IS BETTER. Sheeple are so common these days, especially with Google. All companies have their bad ideas and their good ideas. Vista was bad. Windows 7 was good. Games for Windows Live was bad. XBOX Live is good. Windows Mobile sucked. Windows Phone 7 is great, especially with Mango hitting within 2 weeks. Hotmail has a great interface. Surface is an amazing product. Kinect is a great product. Zune HD is a media player that blows iPods out of the water. Noone at Microsoft is forcing you to do anything. They bundle things. Its totally up to you to use the products, or find something else. They try to offer a better service, sometimes fail at it, and then dump it.

Then dump it,

after they make as much as they can off of it first of course. Microshits problem isn't that they can't develop great products, it's that they take peoples money for shitty ones. Oh wait, that's our problem, since we're the ones getting fucked. Microshits motto is "change for the sake of change". The entire software industry is pretty much the same, just like the car industry. Improvements are rarely ever made, yet consumer dollars are frequently spent. Can't really blame them for milking the cows as much as they can though.

<.<

Dude, Microsoft takes there bad ideas and forces it down everybody's throat. With Vista they tried EVERYTHING to force us to use it, even announcing that they were going to stop production of XP at a time were XP was out selling Vista. With games for windows live, you couldn't play the games with out installing it, which it did with out asking you. I could go on, but you are not really worth my time.

Also,

They said Halo 2 was best experienced on that resource hog of a farce called Vista even though that game was for the original Shitbox. They still haven't allowed Halo 2 on anything else. Even the newest games run on XP, & better than they'd ever run on Vista. XBL/GFW is retarded. You have to buy MS points & then use points to buy content? Do they still do that? WTF's wrong w/just paying directly with cash? Oh that's right, nothing, so Microsoft thought they'd see if they could fuck that up too. Just to be different. What's with binding the Home key to GFW? Thought they'd see if they could fuck up the ability to re-map keys, since probably no one has done that before? Google works. People use it because it works. It works better than people need it to, it works better than people expect it to. When can you ever say that about Microshit? They can't even unveil a new OS w/out blue screening the presentation!!! Google caught Microshit "spying" on their results. The Microshit money making machine is @ it again brother.

Typical Microsoft Fan Boy

They have one after the other bad ideas. Google is better, because it is simple. It's JUST a search engine. Bing tries to force all sorts of shit down your throat. And they DO force us to do things, such as having a shitty multiplayer service like Games for Windows Live in our games and Xbox Live replacing it doesn't make me feel any better, it's still a shit service.

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