Bing… Bang… THUD!

So, what does $80-$100 million in marketing buy you?  Well, if you’re Microsoft, that’s enough to bring about twice the amount of traffic to their new Bing search engine than their old, MSN Live search engine.  The good news - that’s enough to take Bing passed Yahoo as the 2nd most popular search engine around!

The bad news - that’s still about 40x less traffic than Google.

The badder news - All that traffic went back to Yahoo after 1 week.

The baddest news - The Bing search engine still sucks.

Microsoft’s entire strategy here is backwards…  training-their-fire at Yahoo makes about as much sense as Apple ignoring Microsoft Windows dominance and marketing Macs to Commodore 64 users…

Yahoo has, about, 5% of the search engine market, Microsoft - about half that at 2.5%…  Google?  87.62% market-share for all search engine traffic.  Yahoo is, essentually, dying…  the days of Yahoo making waves in search are long-gone.  MS would be better off shooting for Google and  just forget about Yahoo.

The future of Social Networks

To know the future, just look to the past.  Each of the big Social Networking, “Web 2.0″, sites share commonalities with Web 1.0 sites that were popular ‘in their day’…  and this is not necessarily a good thing for the Social Networks.  For example:

Flickr is the new GeoCities…  a very popular place for people to upload their content.  Getting people to upload and view content is one thing, but turning that into a profitable business is another.
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