Microsoft's Bing search business finally is profitable

By -
Summary: Microsoft's search business has turned the corner and is finally profitable, and generated $1 billion in revenues during the company's first quarter of 2016.It's been a long, long time in coming, but Microsoft's Bing is officially no longer a bottomless money pit.

During its first quarter fiscal 2016 earnings call, Microsoft announced that Bing had finally achieved profitability. Search contributed more than $1 billion to Microsoft's first quarter for fiscal 2016, said Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood during the company's October 22 earnings call.

For the past few months, Microsoft execs had been saying to expect Bing to break even some time during the company's fiscal 2016.
Microsoft officials told analysts back in 2013 that Microsoft could see the light at the end of the Bing datacenter-building tunnel.
Microsoft has been working to streamline its search and advertising business business for months. Earlier this year, the company handed off its display advertising business (and possibly 1,000-plus of its employees working in that business) to AOL. The company also opted to get out of the map-data-collection business and sold off those assets and about 100 employees to Uber; its new strategy is to license/display other companies' mapping data.
Bing's growth as a Web search engine has been helped noticeably by Microsoft's search pact with Yahoo. Earlier this year, Yahoo and Microsoft negotiated a revised deal, and this week, Yahoo announced it would be working more with Google, with Google providing some search results and ads for Yahoo search queries.
Microsoft isn't simply relying on Yahoo to grow Bing and search, however.
Microsoft has been building Bing into more and more of its products over time.
Microsoft officials said during its October 21 first quarter FY2016 report that its search revenue, excluding traffic-acquisition costs, grew 29 percent, driven by higher revenue per search and search volume.

More interestingly, nearly 20 percent of Microsoft's search revenue in September was driven by Windows 10 devices, officials said. By building Cortana, Microsoft's personal digital assistant which is powered by Bing, directly into its various Windows 10 flavors, Microsoft also is growing the number of Bing searches.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Hacker steals data of millions of Bulgarians, emails it to local media

By -
Image
  Source of the data breach appears to be the country's National Revenue Agency A mysterious hacker has stolen the personal details of millions of Bulgarians and has emailed download links to the stolen data to local news publications. The data's origin is believed to be the country's National Revenue Agency (NRA), a department of the Bulgarian Ministry of Finance. In a  message posted on its website  on Monday, the NRA said it was working with the Ministry of the Interior and the State Agency for National Security (SANS) to investigate the hack. "We are currently verifying whether the data is real," said the NRA. Hours after this article's publication, the Bulgarian Ministry of the Interior  confirmed the hack . HACKER STOLE 110 DATABASES, LEAKED 57 According to reports from local media [ 1 ,  2 ,  3 ,  4 ,  5 ], who received part of the data, the hacker said they stole the personal details of over five million Bulgarians, of the country's total populatio
Read more

​Linux totally dominates supercomputers

By -
Image
It finally happened. Today, all 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux. Linux rules supercomputing. This day has been coming since 1998, when Linux first appeared on the TOP500 Supercomputer list . Today it finally happened:  All 500 of the world's fastest supercomputers are running Linux . The last two non-Linux systems, a pair of Chinese IBM POWER computers running AIX, dropped off the  November 2017 TOP500 Supercomputer list . Overall, China now leads the supercomputing race with 202 computers to the US' 144. China also leads the US in aggregate performance. China's supercomputers represent 35.4 percent of the Top500's flops, while the US trails with 29.6 percent. With an anti-science regime in charge of the government, America will only continue to see its technological lead decline. When the  first Top500 supercomputer list was compiled in June 1993 , Linux was barely more than a toy. It hadn't even adopted Tux as its masc
Read more

Microsoft tries to stem its self-made collaboration-tool confusion

By -
Image
Microsoft is using this week's Ignite conference to try to help clarify its collaboration-tool strategy. Here's how SharePoint, Teams and Yammer figure in the mix. Choice is good. But too much choice, especially when it comes to collaboration tools, has been a problem for Microsoft. This isn't news to customers, partners or Microsoft execs themselves. But at the company's Ignite IT Pro conference in Orlando this week, Microsoft execs took a step to try to clarify the company's strategy and messaging in this area. Microsoft Office 365 Marketing chief Ron Markezich kicked off the conference this week with a slide entitled "Microsoft 365 Teamwork: Where to Start a Conversation." That slide attempts to do what  Microsoft initially attempted with a 60-plus-page whitepaper : Clarify which collaboration tools customers should use when. The slide, which features SharePoint -- and its files, sites and content storage at the center -- is broken down into t
Read more