We’ve long derided Bing as being the search engine nobody uses apart from Microsoft employees, but Microsoft has just announced that as of the first quarter of fiscal 2016, the search engine is actually profitable (via ZDNet).
This has been helped along by Windows 10 to a large degree, which uses Cortana – Microsoft’s voice-activated AI – to perform searches using Bing. During its Q1 FY2016 earnings call yesterday, Microsoft said that 20% of its search revenue in September was “driven by Windows 10 devices” and that overall search revenue contributed $1 billion to the company’s bottom line, thanks to increased revenues per search and higher search volumes.
Execs over at the software giant have long been telling the press to expect Bing to be profitable sometime in 2016, so this development wasn’t entirely unexpected. Clearly, the arrival of Windows 10 has had a significant impact on Bing’s fortunes, but by the sound of things it won’t stop there.
Microsoft has quietly been building Bing directly into more of its products – Office, for instance, makes extensive use of Bing’s analytics and data-mining capabilities behind the scenes (via Redmond Blog) – and entering into partnerships with Yahoo and even Google to help grow its search revenues.
So while we’ve given Bing a hard time, and in the short term it has not exactly caught up with Google (or even begun to threaten it, really), it’s turning out to be part of a longer-term search strategy by Microsoft. And as of right now, it’s begun to pay off.
The lesson here? Don’t count Microsoft out, even when on the surface things appear quite dire – there’s always more going on than meets the eye.
[Source – ZDNet, Redmond Blog]
