How is bing anything but an enormous gift to google?
What I see is a marginally profitable business (finally, following years of huge / $4B per year losses) that obscures google's true monopoly in the US. For all the claims of 20% search marketshare, on my personal blog, google has 98.7% marketshare in the last 10k search visits. It's an open question if bing is worth the hassle -- is it foreseeably profitable enough that msft should continue in that business?
imo, it would quite damaging to google if msft shut bing down, reallocated the engineers to more profitable projects, and let google own their 75% + bing's 20% == undeniable monopoly search marketshare, with the immediate antitrust implications, in the US.
Microsoft's biggest threats appears to be things like chromebook, google apps, and ios/android rendering windows and office largely unnecessary. I don't see how having a search engine helps any of the above.
Why is cortana important? They will be competing with similar free products that are hardware subsidized or ad subsidized. Where and how does this turn into income? msft just sold off a big chunk of their ad operations, and almost certainly will not be selling large amounts of hardware. Xbox one has sold ~10mm units, and as a road into the living room has been mostly a complete failure. That's neither large enough for ad subsidies or hardware subsidies to work. What am I missing?
Because Cortana is the manifestation of engineering capacity to crunch user data to make deeper decisions and better offerings to end users. That capacity is why Google, Apple and now MSFT are all chasing the ability to do voice, because that means they can do highly sophisticated data crunching on their massive computational capacity.
It aligns directly with each's desire to deliver products and services (yes, even Apple - music suggestions is one example) rather than just be a hardware/software retailer.
Cortana, siri and Google now are the future of advertising and sales. "Okay Google, order me a pizza". "Hey siri, call me a cab". "Cortana, I need restaurant reservations at 8. Something nice".
The virtual assistant's job is to pick a supplier and spend your money on your behalf. Everybody wants a piece of that.
Maybe - but users won't go for it if there's a principal-agent problem. Google and Apple will face a temptation to choose suppliers that pay the highest commissions and they'll have to overcome that temptation if they want their services to take off.
They won't get users to say "Siri, book me a flight" if it books you a $500 American Airlines flight when you wanted a $300 Southwest flight.
Even having a 95% market share in would not interest US antitrust regulators. US antitrust law exists to protect the consumer. Someone has to abuse the consumer before anyone cares.
Curious what your blog is about, because people who use bing normally don't pick it, they just use it because whatever they last installed made it the default.
It's about R, data science, etc. So that's a fair point, but "the search engine used by people who don't know they're using it" doesn't seem like a winning business proposition.
Satya Nadella did just state in an employee memo that Microsoft has to "make some tough choices in areas where things are not working".
This and their exit from the display ads business (http://seekingalpha.com/news/2605555-bloomberg-microsoft-exi... ) seems to be a move in that direction.
That's actually an excellent point. Through a partnership with Uber, Microsoft could offer very up-to-date street imaging that Google wouldn't be able to match (at this point anyway).
