For most companies, when a business unit bleeds cash like a gunshot victim in Compton you dump it. But that’s not apparently how it works at Microsoft. Their search engine Bing has lost $5.5 billion since it launched in 2009. But much like the Cylons, they have a plan to stop the bleeding:
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.”
I really doubt that will work. People are so used to Googling things that they would have to work extremely hard to change people’s search habits. The only good part about this is that Microsoft is swimming in so much cash that they can wait this out and see if they can win market share one user at a time.