Marie's blog: Does Microsoft's Bing Have An End Game?

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Does Microsoft's Bing Have An End Game?

The New York Times published an article July 30 describing Microsoft's pushback against Google in search and search advertising. For anyone who's been following the Bing-Google battle over the past few months or years, there's not an enormous amount of new information in the piece (aside from how Microsoft will name its next three search-upgrade cycles after rock bands). Nonetheless, it's an excellent refresher on the overall search wars, and how Microsoft seems determined to burn hundreds of millions of dollars (and employ a massive team of people) in order to stay in the game.

Bing has gained incremental but steady market share over the past two years, but that's come at an enormous cost to Microsoft, whose online services division lost $2.56 billion over the last fiscal year despite a rise in revenue.

"This is a long-term journey," Qi Lu, president of the division, told the Times. But that's basically all you can say when you're setting fire to a mountain of cash.

In addition to focusing on the granular features that supposedly differentiate it as a "decision engine"--including the ability to search for flights and shop for stuff--Microsoft seems intent on boosting Bing's viability via partnerships with other companies. That includes Redmond's deal with Yahoo to handle the latter's back-end search, something that helped increase Bing's market share. It also involves a deepening relationship with Facebook, which is also not exactly Google's best friend.

Over the past few months, more and more Facebook features have found their way into Bing's user interface. When you query Bing for specific people, for example, the search engine can offer Facebook information on the results page. If you're traveling to a new city, such as Paris, Bing can tell you which Facebook friends live there. Bing Director Stefan Weitz once described this process to eWEEK as "infusing the emotional" into queries, and it certainly helps further differentiate Microsoft's offering from Google.

However, Microsoft investors seem less than sanguine about the online services' costs, inevitably raising questions about Bing's end game. Does Microsoft want to topple Google and send it to the dustbin of history? Is it content with Bing as a strong second-runner in search, provided it can stem those gargantuan operating losses? Certainly Microsoft can't divest itself of Bing entirely, given the increasing importance of the cloud to the company's overall fortunes, not to mention its inability to cede anything to Google.

Whatever its ultimate goal, and barring some sort of massive collapse on Google's part, Microsoft will likely have to satisfy itself with slow gains in the space.