It makes $10+B per year, pennies next to Google of course, but non-negligible. https://backlinko.com/bing-users#
> In the 2023 fiscal year (ends on June 30), Microsoft reported $12.2 billion in search and news advertising.
Agree it is important to note this is not net, net seems to be about half according to article.
Yes, that's called a monopoly.
I think Mozilla should just run an ad auction to choose the search engine. Bing/MS would pay to capture market share, and Google would pay to prevent Bing from gaining ground.
So let them fight it out.
This is not exactly what’s happening? Google is just willing to pay more.
What "golden egg" do Google have besides an ad-selling business? Last time I looked into it ads of various forms accounted for basically all of their revenue, somewhere around 85% or more.
Google search, Maps, and GMail are the big 3 web services. These don't bring in revenue all by themselves, but they bring users to look at ads which is where they make all their money. There's also Chrome (directs people to Google services and facilitates their use of those services). Finally, there's Android, which is a little different but like Apple, they get revenue from the Play Store on it, and again push users to use their own search engine and browser.
> but they bring users to look at ads which is where they make all their money Ad sales is their golden egg. Practically everything else is an egg truck to sell that one thing.
Ads by themselves aren't a golden egg. Users don't want to look at ads, and certainly aren't going to pay for them. That's why they came up with those other products, to sell ads to advertisers.
It's just like newspapers: historically successful papers like the NYT didn't get rich by doing great journalism and selling papers to people, they got rich selling ads, with the journalism being a way to get people to subscribe to the paper.
The pair of eyeballs are an integral part of the ad product that is sold to customers who buy ad spots.
Cows don't want to be eaten but burgers are absolutely McDonalds golden egg.
The only potential outlier is the cloud stuff, but even then I think it's essentially a 'economies of scale' thing, for the same reason Amazon started AWS, rather than a real revenue centre.
Also, states are different than they used to be, but there is still a lot to learn from history, and you often see that similar struggles get fought over and over, or similar mistakes get made. Verdun has been a major battleground in WW1 because that's where Charlemagne's legacy got split up. As another example of a phrase still relevant today, there is "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
No, in fact, Azure's revenue is higher than that of Windows and Office combined [1]. Microsoft is far more diversified than Google is. Google has been trying for a decade to achieve Microsoft's diversification and has not succeeded (Bard being the latest such failure).
[1]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/microsofts-revenue-by-produ...
Microsoft has of course tried but Bing is only really propped up by Microsoft's deep pockets. It's not a profitable enterprise (AFAIK). And this is with Microsoft using every trick they can to bypass EU and US consent decrees and legislation to trick users into Bing. Microsoft has poured billions into Bing.
Apple rejected Google Maps and launched their own Maps product in 2012. Obviously they consider this core to their business so I get it. But even with Apple's resources, it's taken more than a decade for Apple Maps to reach some parity with Google Maps.
It's really hard for a goose to lay a second golden egg. With Microsoft, it's their Windows/Office monopoly. With Apple it's the iPhone. Google is an outlier among outlier because they do have several golden eggs but one is much bigger than all the others (ie search).
Think about it. If Apple makes $300 billion in revenue selling iPhones (made up number), how would as an internal leader try and build a search engine? The iPhone will always take absolute priority, mainly because your search engine is such a drop in the revenue bucket. But without these resources and this priority it'll never grow big. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Sometimes just throwing money at a problem just isn't enough.
[1]: https://technologizer.com/2009/05/19/a-brief-history-of-goog...
[2]: https://searchengineland.com/neeva-shutting-down-427384