New Bing Apps For Windows Phone Point To Increasing Platform Unity From Microsoft
This morning Microsoft announced updates to Bing apps for Windows Phone (News, Finance, Weather, Sports), and new Bing-based apps for the smartphone platform: Food and Drink, Health and Fitness, and Travel.
Context & Ripple Effects
Bing has been drifting out of the search box for years — back in 2010, [[a:1187811|Bing Entertainment folded full music streams, games and TV listings directly into search results]], an early sign Microsoft saw Bing as a content surface rather than a links page. The platform politics have cut both ways: in 2011, the Bing Deals app shipped for Android and iOS while Windows Phone 7 users were left waiting, a sore point for the young OS's early adopters.
Today's announcement flips that dynamic. With updates to News, Finance, Weather and Sports plus brand-new Food and Drink, Health and Fitness and Travel apps, Windows Phone now hosts the fullest Bing vertical lineup of any platform — notable timing given rumors that Microsoft has no new Windows Phone hardware or software models planned for Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this month. The pickup across The Verge, CNET, InfoWorld, TNW and Microsoft's own blogs shows how much weight observers put on any Windows Phone software news in a two-horse mobile market.
First-order effects
- Windows Phone users gain six Bing-branded content apps covering lifestyle verticals their platform previously lacked, narrowing the app-gap complaint against iOS and Android at zero licensing cost to Microsoft.
- The Bing apps team becomes one of Microsoft's most visible contributors to Windows Phone's storefront just as rumors say MWC will bring nothing new on the hardware side.
Second-order effects
- The 2011 Bing Deals precedent — Android and iOS getting a Bing app before Windows Phone did — suggests these verticals will eventually face pressure to go cross-platform, forcing Microsoft to decide whether they are phone-exclusive bait or portable Bing assets.
- Rival mobile platforms get a free look at what Bing-powered content apps can do, raising the bar for Google's own News, Weather and Finance offerings on Android and iOS.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Microsoft is decoupling its services from its OS: Bing evolves from a search destination into a portfolio of reusable content apps that could anchor the company's presence on any screen, weakening the old assumption that first-party apps exist only to sell devices.
- For Windows Phone specifically, sustained first-party investment in content apps becomes a structural substitute for the third-party app volume it cannot attract — a defensive strategy that works only as long as Microsoft keeps shipping.
The trend: Microsoft is repositioning Bing from a search box into a family of portable vertical content apps, with Windows Phone currently serving as the showcase platform.