Bing’s Not the Laughingstock of Technology Anymore

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-30/microsoft-s-bing-is-not-the-laughingstock-of-technology-anymore

by adventured • 7 years ago

47 11 7 years ago

bloomberg.com

mc32• 7 years ago

One thing I’ll give Bing. They don’t tend to editorialize or curate searches to sanitize politics, news and causes.

Now of course they do try their best to keep illegal things from getting indexed. Not talking about that.

SOLAR_FIELDS• 7 years ago

I'm just happy that there is still some semblance of competition in search land. Having Bing, DDG and Google all playing in the space guarantees that at least Google is forced to innovate to maintain their near-monopoly.

snowwindwaves• 7 years ago

Ddg apparently uses bing.

jambutters• 7 years ago

I thought it was apple maps or Google plus

ducttape12• 7 years ago

I've said it before and I'll say it again - replacing Balmer with Nadella was one of the best things they've done.

People go on and on about Facebook and Google, but I've been really impressed with Microsoft. They're making some really great, innovative products - and they're turning a nice profit too.

(yes, I realize Bing is just a Google clone, but I'm talking more generally about the company)

locknumber110• 7 years ago

Yeah, it really is like night and day. I'm an old-school Linux fanboy. I remember when the Halloween documents were fresh news. I had a four-digit Slashdot ID. I've built LFS just for fun. I used to use a dollar sign when spelling the company's name. For most of my adult life I've had absolutely no love for Ballmer-led Microsoft.

But the last few years have shown that Microsoft under Nadella is a completely different animal. Ten years ago, if someone told me that one of the best IDEs on the Linux desktop would be an MIT-licensed project from Microsoft, I'd have thought they were drunk, crazy, and high. But lo and behold, we have VS Code, and it's awesome. There's MS engineers contributing code to the Linux kernel. One of the best ad-blocking web browsers on Android is Microsoft Edge. A Debian distro (albeit one without a Linux kernel) is a 1st-party app on the Windows app store.

It's gotten to the point where I'm seriously wondering how much code under the hood of their prototype demo "Modern OS" is from Microsoft, and how much is actually from Canonical. They're already adding a proper Linux kernel for WSL2.

Interesting times.

ToFab123• 7 years ago

Bing still is a laughingstock unless you change your regional settings on bing.com to USA. If you do that you may find that you have little need to visit Google anymore.

It is my impression that most users are completely unaware of the effect changing region on bing have and that bing is amazing if you do.

So odd that default setting, for most, is non-US and for those user Bing is still very much a laughingstock compared to Google.

US and non-US bing is not the same product. Non-US lacks most of the cool features found on the US version so why non-US is the default is something that has pusseled me for years. Very odd behavior to degrade your own product the way Microsoft does with Bing.

Zanni• 7 years ago

What's staggering to me is that Bing can have a borderline insignificant share of the search market and still bring in $7.5 billion in revenue.

corwin7• 7 years ago

I laugh at anyone using Microsoft software or products.

Bing’s Not the Laughingstock of Technology Anymore

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