Microsoft’s Bing which was started as a rival to Google’s search engine, today stands no where near in front of Google. It was a very expensive bet for Microsoft to launch Bing.
Perhaps Microsoft did not realise this at its very start when debut was made by Bing in June 2009. According to CNN Money, Microsoft has already lost about 5.5 billion US dollars on Bing since its launch and it continues to lose about 1 billion US dollar every quarter in its upkeep.
The report by CNN also tells that from the time Microsoft began breaking the finance of the online division, which happened in 2007, the online division has been losing money and as of today the total loss that the company has lost due to this is about 9 billion US dollars.
Despite of the huge losses, the company is still determined to go ahead with the search engine and is promoting its search engine in almost every possible way. According to Qi Lu, President of Online Services at Microsoft, the growth path which they see for Bing is not to “out-Google”, but to change the way people think and use search engines.
Many of the companies in the world would have given up their dreams if their products brought them such loses. But not for Microsoft, it is a cash rich company sitting on a pile of 53 billion US dollars and many other short and long term investments. The company is only concerned with promoting its search engine, no matter how much money the search engine sucks out of it.