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发帖数: 8469 | 1 Microsoft’s plan to stop Bing’s $1 billion bleeding
http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/20/technology/microsoft_bing/index
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Bing, Microsoft’s two-year old search engine, is
losing nearly a $1 billion a quarter, with no sign of letting up.
Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) has lost $5.5 billion on Bing since the search
service launched in June 2009, but the company’s search losses actually
pre-date that. In fact, the software giant has never made money in its
online services division. Since Microsoft began breaking out that unit’s
finances in 2007, the company has lost a total of $9 billion.
Even the good news with Bing isn’t so great. Microsoft proudly proclaims
that it has gained search market share against Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) in
each of the past 27 months. While that’s true, it is not gaining search
share from Google.
Bing currently maintains a 14.7% share of the search market, up from 8.4%
when Bing launched, according to online data tracker comScore (SCOR). Google
currently commands 64.8% of the market — down just two-tenths of a
percentage point from the 65% it held when Bing debuted.
More than half the share that Bing has gained has actually come from third-
place Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500). The rest has come from search cellar-
dwellers Ask.com and AOL (AOL).
There’s usually no such thing as “bad” market share growth, but Yahoo’s
search is powered by Bing. That means more than half of Microsoft’s share
growth has come from cannibalizing its search partner.
Can Bing escape its stagnation and actually make money? Microsoft says it
has a solution.
At the company’s financial analyst meeting in Anaheim, Calif., last week,
Microsoft President of Online Services Qi Lu gave an impassioned speech
about how Bing would improve search by “reorganizing the Web.” To do that,
Microsoft plans to leverage its network of products and partnerships to
gain a better understanding of what the user is after when they enter a
query into a Bing search box. Ultimately, Microsoft believes its technical
secret sauce will let Bing both expand what is “searchable” and deliver
more robust search results than any of its competitors.
Lu said Microsoft could not and would not try to “out-Google” Google.
Instead, it must “change the game fundamentally.”
Bing has already begun to show some of that capability. For instance, though
partnerships with various ticketing agencies, a search for “Mariners
tickets” will display links to upcoming games and a map of Seattle’s
Safeco Field showing fans where tickets are available. A search for flight
information will tell you when the best day is to purchase a plane ticket.
Searching for “digital camera” will display images of cameras that can be
filtered, sorted and compared.
It’s a step forward from a laundry list of blue links.
Through its search partnership with Facebook, its mobile partnership with
Nokia (NOK) and its marriage with various Microsoft products, Bing will
gradually gain a semantic understanding of the Web, Lu said. That will
transform search from today’s noun-based keyword entry — a system Lu
dismissed as “caveman speak” — to eventually give Bing the ability to
field questions phrased in natural human language.
It sounds great. But how is this thing going to make money?
Stefan Weitz, Microsoft’s director of Bing, believes that if Bing can
change the way people think about search, sooner or later users will switch
over from Google.
“Our challenge is that no one wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I really
wish there was a better search engine,’” Weitz said. “That’s why, for us
, it’s always been about figuring out how to accomplish more than we
thought was possible with a search engine. Eventually, people will expect to
do more with search, and if they can’t, they’ll be disappointed.”
Luring users away from Google is a daunting task. Microsoft is competing
against a verb — “I’ll go Google that” — and an entrenched consumer
habit.
Even if Microsoft can steal market share from Google, it faces a long
journey toward profitability. Market share is key in search: With it,
advertisers flock to you, and you can charge high rates for ads. But without
it, search is a very expensive business.
To capture the attention of a critical mass of advertisers — enough to turn
a profit — multiple analysts said that Bing will need at least 25% to 30%
of the market. That’s double its current share.
Meanwhile, Google is also scrambling to — as Microsoft put it — “do more
with search.” Google recently launched a new social network, integrated
advanced flight data into its search results, and tweaked its algorithm to
favor original content.
Weitz calls the Bing-vs-Google rivalry a “big geek slap fight,” and says
Microsoft has one key advantage over its rival: It has nothing to lose by
experimenting. On the flip side, slight tweaks to Google’s search algorithm
send shivers down the spines of companies that rely on high rankings.
“We are able to try things with much more flexibility,” said Weitz. “If
we make a mistake, it’s not going to take down the company.”
Most analysts are bullish on Bing’s technology, but they’re mixed on
whether Internet users will really change their behavior.
“Bing will likely be better than Google over time, but even if it is, users
and advertisers still need to go to them,” said Sid Parakh, analyst at
McAdams Wright Ragen. “To be clear, this will take a long, long time to
play out. This is something Microsoft will continue to lose money on.”
Several analysts, including Parakh, predict that Bing will continue to
incrementally improve and gain share, becoming profitable in another three
to four years.
Looking at Google’s dominance, it may seem impossible today for a rival to
get a significant foothold. But the tech world is funny like that: No one
could have imagined 13 years ago that a small search engine out of Stanford
University would ever unseat the mighty Yahoo.
“When you’re talking about something like consumer behavior and
advertising, having the advantage of being the first place people go is hard
for another company to counteract,” said Sue Feldman, search engine
analyst at IDC. “Can it change? Sure. As with everything in technology, in
a period of tremendous ferment and innovation, something could happen to
overturn a market leader.” |
