I just did an analysis of Bing (Microsoft’s third and no-doubt final effort to make it in the world of Search).
Accompanied by tens of millions of dollars of advertising, and massive efforts to build strategic alliances, Bing has increased the MS market share considerably in the months since its release. So, a success?
Actually, looked at closely, the biggest reason for the increase in market share is Microsoft’s massive push to get users of older versions of Internet Explorer onto version 8.
MS has pushed IE8 out twice via automatic updates. If you avoid that, every time you install a patch, the first time you run Internet Explorer, they take you to a page to explain why you should download IE8 and to make it easy for you to do so. Just click.
That has resulted in some 10% of Internet Users switching from IE6 to IE8. And when they do that, MS of course wants to use Bing as your default search engine. You have to go out of your way to switch to anything else.
You’d expect Bing to increase their market share by 10% from that alone. Yet the MS share of the search market has increased by less than that.
So people in massive numbers are taking the time and effort to go back to using Google.
In a word, fail.