
Bing profitable, Microsoft Revenue slips 12% - ChuckMcM
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/bing-profitable-but-microsoft-revenue-down-12-percent-as-shift-to-cloud-continues/
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ChuckMcM
I find this really fascinating, mostly because I was at Google when Microsoft
launched Bing. And watching Google's CPC numbers slide over the last 6 years
while Bing's got better, my guess was that Bing would become profitable in
2016 (but they beat that by keeping costs down it seems).

So what that means for the search market is that it is being commoditized. And
that is really bad news for Google if they can't find another market to
sustain their margins.

For me, nothing is so amazing as watching the technology waves sweep through
the world, leaving it changed in their wake.

~~~
makecheck
It's interesting that a new-ish search engine can even survive, since so many
have died.

I remember the old days when (say) Apple had a tool on Mac OS 8.5 that would
send a query to many different search engines. There were enough of them, and
they were all iffy enough, that you couldn't really just pick one search site
to see good results.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Well the last quarter they broke it out, Google was paying $4B/year to buy
traffic for search. That was up from about $400M/year when I started tracking
it. (and of course up from 0 when they started). One of the consequences of
'commodityness' of search is that owning the box you type into becomes
critical. Through a series of missteps they damaged the growth of Chrome, they
lost default search on Firefox to Yahoo, and to a bunch of apps on iOS. Of
course they didn't have anything going for them on Windows phone but Microsoft
does all of its "internal" search (which is not organically a search box but
things like searching the "app store" or "places to eat" within tools to Bing
vs the user's browser's search provider. And because its "good enough" people
don't force it back to Google.

As a former "new-ish search engine" it became pretty clear it was a huge
challenge to compete stack for stack. Much simpler to just insert yourself
ahead of them in the chain and peel off a fraction of the advertising revenue.

A lot of change headed for the Google Plex, a lot of change.

