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To make the claim that this is a bad thing, one must argue that Microsoft's stock would be worth more today if Microsoft had not been aggressive about search.

How a company shows gains and losses is also very subjective. The numbers could turn around and show strong profits around the time that bing reaches 45% market share (which will be soon).




45%? Not even in Ballmer's wet dreams.

Bing's market share is only up 4% since launch http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earn...

and most of those gains must have come at the expense of Yahoo!


What is your projection for search market share in 5 years?

It's a business that takes lots of investment in scale. I think Google is one misstep away from Bing grabbing lots more share.

Google instant was a near-miss. Even on my new macbook wtih google chrome it's annoyingly jittery and hinders the user experience.


You can see how much they have moved in the past 12 months in this graph. Project this forward 5 years [flash warning]

http://gs.statcounter.com/?PHPSESSID=nv37oj3f3ovned6v8hr2mlp...


so: not much. Or not?


And how much of that spending goes into supporting online efforts of other divisions. I imagine the "online" division handles everything most everything that goes online even if it is supporting offline products.


My understanding is that the Online division is only responsible for standalone consumer-oriented services, specifically Bing plus MSN. Online services that are tied to other products, such as Windows Live or Xbox Live or Office 365 are part of the respective divisions for those products, and more platform/infrastructure-oriented services like Azure are part of Server & Tools.




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