Bye bye BING!!

[DesiPower]

So there will be no competition for scroogle? That's sad

 

[Linflas]

I don't think Elop would get rid of Bing entirely, but it's probably about time to reevaluate how and why things are being done.

The Xbox, though... If it's not a major success by the end of next year, I think you can kiss it goodbye.

I don't really follow console gaming so I am a bit confused as I thought XBox 360 was a major success for MS, why would they kill it? Is this conjecture based on XBox One vs PS4?

 

[darkewaffle]

I don't really follow console gaming so I am a bit confused as I thought XBox 360 was a major success for MS, why would they kill it? Is this conjecture based on XBox One vs PS4?

It has mindshare but the hardware itself was not profitable until pretty late in the game iirc. Though I thought they made out pretty well off royalties from game sales.

 

[bearxor]

I don't really follow console gaming so I am a bit confused as I thought XBox 360 was a major success for MS, why would they kill it? Is this conjecture based on XBox One vs PS4?

It has mindshare but the hardware itself was not profitable until pretty late in the game iirc. Though I thought they made out pretty well off royalties from game sales.

It was a pretty big mind share win for Microsoft, which was the goal, but the whole E&D division ran at a loss until 2007. Even now, the E&D division doesn't constitute a large portion of Microsoft's profit. Look at this chart:

The E&D department, which is the small purple segment towards the bottom encompasses all things Xbox. Game sales, publishing royalties, hardware sales, accessories, xbox live, everything. It also includes things like Windows Phone, Zune and Surface.

It's profitable now, yes. But is it worth keeping around? Possibly not, if a new CEO decides to change Microsoft's overarching strategy of taking over the living room and decides to focus a lot more on cloud services and enterprise computing.

I think if the One is a big hit and stays competitive with the PS4, it'll stick around, simply because of the name recognition and living room penetration for other MS services. But if it's the end of 2014 and sales are lagging and haven't kept pace with Sony, I don't think MS management will have any more patience. It's part of the reason the box is not being sold at a loss now. The Xbox has to start pulling it's weight and FAST.

EDIT: And the chart also includes Online Services, just for reference, which encompasses Bing. It always runs in the red. I think it's more important to MS's overall strategy, however, and is probably pretty safe for now. Worst case scenario I see with regards to that is that MS sells it to Yahoo, who promptly just eliminate the Bing name and MS strikes a long-term agreement during the sale to use Yahoo services for really cheap. That's worst case, IMO.

 

[Pacfanweb]

That's bad for everyone. Exchanging a MS monopoly for a Google monopoly isn't progress. There needs to be competition to keep innovation going, and to help keep malicious features at bay.

Yep. The MS monopoly was much less worse than Google. MS wanted you to own only their products.

Google wants to own YOU.

 

[PieIsAwesome]

That's bad for everyone. Exchanging a MS monopoly for a Google monopoly isn't progress. There needs to be competition to keep innovation going, and to help keep malicious features at bay.

There is no need for competition to ensure that progress is made. Google's plans for world domination are all the motivation it needs.

 

[Schmide]

I would really be ok with bing if they would stop trying to install bing bar and desktop. It is not cool if I hide the update to restore it.

I actually use bing for a few searches, google still regular engine, but MS is super annoying with their marketing/sneaky installs. It tarnishes their brand.

 

[Linflas]

I would really be ok with bing if they would stop trying to install bing bar and desktop. It is not cool if I hide the update to restore it.

I actually use bing for a few searches, google still regular engine, but MS is super annoying with their marketing/sneaky installs. It tarnishes their brand.

Google does this as well by installing Chrome/Google toolbar on workstations through Java/Flash etc updates unless the user notices and unchecks the "agreement".

 

[PrinceofWands]

Thank God. Surface, Bing, Vista, and 8...the most useless, obnoxious wastes of money and time ever.

 

[Ventanni]

Bing can and likely will be profitable given enough time. That is, if investors want to keep it around that long to see a return on investment. It takes an absolutely enormous sum of cash to get a search engine of its size profitable, but I think they've done a pretty good job so far. What Bing needs to work on though to allow it to break even is its advertising platform. Bing is pretty solid. It's ad platform, you know the thing that actually allows search engines to make money, is...not.

 

[ImpulsE69]

I stopped reading this thread when someone said "companies don't always do things to make money". EVERYTHING a company does is about making money, even if they lose money doing it.

It's funny I would never have guessed bing had even that much market share...never touched it.

 

[mmntech]

Honestly, I can't think of a single person I know that uses Bing. We used to use Bing Maps on our website, and our sister station still does on theirs. But we eventually switched to Google because honestly, it's just a better service and having a good mapping interface is a huge part of what we do.

Microsoft is trying to shoehorn Bing into Windows 8. Not sure how well it's going for them since everyone hates Metro.

DuckDuckGo is getting better slowly. I think a lot of the geeks are gravitating towards it because they don't store search data. Though I'm not quite sure how they make their money.

 

[Ventanni]

Thank God. Surface, Bing, Vista, and 8...the most useless, obnoxious wastes of money and time ever.

Surface - It's actually a pretty awesome product. I used a Surface one weekend and I loved it. The critical flaw I felt though was why Microsoft decided to take their greatest company strength and throw it out the window (pun intended) when developing this product; it's ecosystem. I mean let's be serious here, without the Apple Store or the Google Store, there isn't too much to do with iOS and Android, respectively. Microsoft has been building a powerful ecosystem with its Windows OS for the last 20-25 years, and suddenly gets the idea that it's okay to start over with the Surface. I mean, the idea had merit, but the only way Surface will ever work is if it has 100% complete parity with your desktop. The Surface Pro has the right idea. Too bad it's too expensive for most users.

Years ago Steve Ballmer humorously got up on stage and shouted, "Developers developers developers!" in a mantra-like fashion, and what he was pertaining to was that if you build an operating system platform that's great to program on, your developers will bring the content, and people will buy it. With several ecosystems attempting to compete with Microsoft nowadays though, it was silly for them to think they could simply create another one for developers to have to program for. I hate to say it, but Microsoft deserved their $900 million dollar loss for their sheer stupidity and for not incorporating their greatest asset they spent the last two decades developing.

Vista - I kinda agree with you here, but it did lead to the development of Windows 7. Without the bloated mistakes of Vista, we wouldn't have 7. More below though.

Bing - See above. Great search engine that's difficult to spend money on.

Windows 8 - Unlike Vista, this is actually a really awesome operating system on release. Too bad it was developed on the wrong platform. Microsoft releases a tablet based operating system on a keyboard & mouse environment and wonders why their sales are low? I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I would have loved to have seen Steve Jobs working at Microsoft while he was alive going off on their corporate executives some of these decisions.

I could go on about the mistakes Microsoft has made over the last few years, but at least now they seem to be learning from them. A few months ago, I was reading how they want to unify their ecosystem and development platform across their desktop, X-Box, and tablet environments. I was like, holy cow, someone finally has some common sense up there!

 

[PrinceofWands]

Surface - It's actually a pretty awesome product. I used a Surface one weekend and I loved it. The critical flaw I felt though was why Microsoft decided to take their greatest company strength and throw it out the window (pun intended) when developing this product; it's ecosystem. I mean let's be serious here, without the Apple Store or the Google Store, there isn't too much to do with iOS and Android, respectively. Microsoft has been building a powerful ecosystem with its Windows OS for the last 20-25 years, and suddenly gets the idea that it's okay to start over with the Surface. I mean, the idea had merit, but the only way Surface will ever work is if it has 100% complete parity with your desktop. The Surface Pro has the right idea. Too bad it's too expensive for most users.

Years ago Steve Ballmer humorously got up on stage and shouted, "Developers developers developers!" in a mantra-like fashion, and what he was pertaining to was that if you build an operating system platform that's great to program on, your developers will bring the content, and people will buy it. With several ecosystems attempting to compete with Microsoft nowadays though, it was silly for them to think they could simply create another one for developers to have to program for. I hate to say it, but Microsoft deserved their $900 million dollar loss for their sheer stupidity and for not incorporating their greatest asset they spent the last two decades developing.

Vista - I kinda agree with you here, but it did lead to the development of Windows 7. Without the bloated mistakes of Vista, we wouldn't have 7. More below though.

Bing - See above. Great search engine that's difficult to spend money on.

Windows 8 - Unlike Vista, this is actually a really awesome operating system on release. Too bad it was developed on the wrong platform. Microsoft releases a tablet based operating system on a keyboard & mouse environment and wonders why their sales are low? I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I would have loved to have seen Steve Jobs working at Microsoft while he was alive going off on their corporate executives some of these decisions.

I could go on about the mistakes Microsoft has made over the last few years, but at least now they seem to be learning from them. A few months ago, I was reading how they want to unify their ecosystem and development platform across their desktop, X-Box, and tablet environments. I was like, holy cow, someone finally has some common sense up there!

Disagree, but that's nothing new. I think MS represents the WORST of blind development and consumerism. In the end it's mostly subjective opinions and differing warrants however, rather than objective facts.

 

[TallBill]

Disagree, but that's nothing new.

You do disagree with everyone don't you :awe:

 

[PrinceofWands]

You do disagree with everyone don't you :awe:

Not everyone, but the masses, yes. If an opinion is 'popular' I'm about 99% certain to feel differently.

 

[TallBill]

Not everyone, but the masses, yes. If an opinion is 'popular' I'm about 99% certain to feel differently.

Lol "the masses".... are we back in twelfth grade creative writing class?

Also, I'd be 99% certain that your statement is wrong, unless you think that rape and murder are ok. I bet you'd agree with the sheeple on one or two topics out of the next 198.

But hey, I think logically.

 

[PrinceofWands]

Lol "the masses".... are we back in twelfth grade creative writing class?

Also, I'd be 99% certain that your statement is wrong, unless you think that rape and murder are ok. I bet you'd agree with the sheeple on one or two topics out of the next 198.

But hey, I think logically.

Well, as examples, I don't believe in statutory rape, nor do I think all things considered murder actually are, so it's a grey area at best.

 

[piasabird]

It is not so much that I would dislike bing, but when an OS or Internet explorer which if installed becomes part of the operating system permanently is blocking Yahoo.com, that is what I have an gripe about. So my wife updates Abode and then Microsoft installs bing Search engine and then every time you try to go to Yahoo, it says server not found. This is an operating system function because it is blocking a server through the networking functions. All of this is integrated between the OS and the Browser. So the Browser becomes and changes the OS software when it is installed. It is really evil that third party software is being used to install this Bing Search Engine and then that same install is blocking access to Yahoo or any other search provider you might have ever installed as a helper software to IE. This activity is the action of a Virus and is unwelcome. For instance, my E-mail comes through Yahoo from att.net. This effectively makes it impossible to send e-mail, unless you install Windows Mail and do all the custom settings.

Sure if a user actually knows what they are doing, they can undue this. However, the low-end user may not be able to defeat this easily.

 

[DesiPower]

Yahoo is Bing

 

[piasabird]

I dont see what is so great about Google. I refuse to use it. I think as a search engine, yahoo works better to find intelligent information.

 

[shortylickens]

I liked Bing better than the rest. I will be sad to see it go.

ditto.

 

[Ferzerp]

It is not so much that I would dislike bing, but when an OS or Internet explorer which if installed becomes part of the operating system permanently is blocking Yahoo.com, that is what I have an gripe about. So my wife updates Abode and then Microsoft installs bing Search engine and then every time you try to go to Yahoo, it says server not found. This is an operating system function because it is blocking a server through the networking functions. All of this is integrated between the OS and the Browser. So the Browser becomes and changes the OS software when it is installed. It is really evil that third party software is being used to install this Bing Search Engine and then that same install is blocking access to Yahoo or any other search provider you might have ever installed as a helper software to IE. This activity is the action of a Virus and is unwelcome. For instance, my E-mail comes through Yahoo from att.net. This effectively makes it impossible to send e-mail, unless you install Windows Mail and do all the custom settings.

Sure if a user actually knows what they are doing, they can undue this. However, the low-end user may not be able to defeat this easily.

This is a whole lot of unsubstantiated b.s. that you've completely made up.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Wow that's a bold move. Will be interesting to see what else this CEO brings to the table for MS. The sad part though is by removing such big division(s) it probably means lot of people are losing their jobs.

 

[Doppel]

I tested bing for a week. Its results were crap and I never went back nor will.