CHART OF THE DAY: This Is What Microsoft Is Getting For Its Big Bing Investment
After spending billions of dollars over the last two years fighting Google with Bing, what does Microsoft have to show for it? — Not much from a marketshare perspective. The latest comScore data shows Bing's share …
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft has now burned through billions on Bing over two years, and the comScore chart behind this piece is the blunt accounting of what that bought: a share number still far below Google's. The company has argued all along that this is an investment story, not a share story — back in February 2010 an executive insisted Bing would make money, and last December SAI framed the core problem as giving users a reason to switch at all (the switching dilemma).
One caveat hangs over the chart itself: comScore admitted in June 2010 that it needed to fix its search-share methodology because Yahoo and Microsoft were gaming the measurement through query rewrites, so the exact figures deserve some skepticism even if the directional picture does not.
First-order effects
- The data puts Microsoft's own profitability argument under strain: billions spent against a flat share line means the return case rests entirely on monetizing a small slice better than Google does, not on winning volume.
- Advertisers and investors get a clean quarterly reference point showing the Bing-Yahoo alliance has not dented Google's hold on queries.
Second-order effects
- Yahoo, whose search results are powered by Bing under their revenue-share deal, inherits the same stagnation — its ad business is chained to Microsoft's ability to grow query share.
- Google can respond by simply out-spending on product rather than marketing, as it was doing concurrently with Google+ social features and Maps traffic expansion, reinforcing the habit loop Bing needs users to break.
Third-order effects
- If sustained multibillion-dollar investment cannot move share, the structural lesson is that search is a default-and-habit market where challenger capex mostly funds R&D spillover for the incumbent's ecosystem — pushing Microsoft toward justifying Bing as infrastructure (ad platform, backend services) rather than a consumer destination.
The trend: Search is hardening into a winner-take-most market where even billion-dollar challenger investments buy relevance and infrastructure, not share.