Apparently Microsoft is talking profit in the midst of 15 straight quarters of losses, according to a Paid Content article this morning. The company is looking to Bing to pull it out of its nearly four-year long slide, Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft senior vice president of online business, said in an interview last night with Reuters.
According to the interview, Bing is looking at becoming a “credible No. 2” as soon as Microsoft closes a deal with Yahoo, making Bing the backbone for Yahoo search. We do see a few areas where Bing has been gaining ground and wonder if Microsoft may be able to come back out of the red.
According to the Reuters, if Microsoft closes the deal with Yahoo, it will then effectively control nearly 30% of the search engine market, a magic number in the advertising business.
“The nice thing is we can say (to advertisers) you can be close to 30 percent share in one easy buy,” Mehdi told Reuters. “Clearly there’s a huge return in the search marketplace that can more than make up the investments we’ve put in to this point.”
In addition to the Yahoo partnership, Microsoft has been in talks recently with Apple about becoming the default search engine on the iPhone. We looked at this scenario last week and found that Bing looks to potentially gain up to 50% of iPhone traffic were it to take over Google’s default spot. At the same time, we also noted data from Hitwise, which showed that Bing had actually lost market share recently.
Image courtesy of Business Insider’s “Chart of the Day”.
