Microsoft Corp. is willing to invest 5 to 10 percent of its operating income into its new search engine, Bing, in the next five years, or up to $11 billion. And that needs to pay off if Microsoft is to stay relevant. But the reality is, for the company to truly challenge the Google juggernaut, it needs to partner with wireless carriers.
Microsoft is taking on an entrenched — really entrenched — incumbent. ComScore places Google’s share at 65 percent. Yahoo!, meanwhile, comes in at 9.39 percent and Bing at 4.82 percent. But a presence in search and Web applications in general — the cloud — is a critical issue for Microsoft, which has seen sales of its desktop software fall along with the sales of PCs.
Mobile broadband is much to blame: Gartner Inc. expects a 32 percent decline in desktop sales next year. Laptop sales will rise just 3 percent in 2009. Netbooks however, optimized for Web-based activities and mobility rather than native software, will reach sales of 21 million units in 2009, almost doubling from 11.7 million units last year. Smartphones are also a growing segment. And all of that means that the traditional licensed software biz — on the consumer side, anyway — is a dying breed. It also means that embracing mobility out of the gate is a smart move.
That’s why Microsoft has an opportunity to partner with wireless carriers to supercharge the audience for Bing. Bing is built to be a more intuitive, “smarter” search tool than previous options in the market, delivering a raft of new ways to slice and dice search results for greater relevancy. Heightened functionality offers a new differentiator to operators, who find themselves battling each other with exclusive handsets and widget stores.
Some options: A Bing/Mobile Microsoft Office tie-up would also give smartphone users greater navigation of documents on the handset — a key user interface consideration. And, adding Bing as a standard feature rather than a WAP portal would give simpler feature phones an added zest.
To boot, Microsoft has a foothold for this: It already is the exclusive search provider for Verizon Wireless and has traditionally done better in market share in the mobile search arena than fixed Internet search market.
