Microsoft pulled in US$3.2 billion in advertising sales four years ago, and it will be well above US$5 billion just from Bing web searches in the just-ended fiscal year.

Ubiquitous Bing has been the revenue-boosting strategy, and it worked. Microsoft said this spring that more than 35 per cent of its search revenue in March came from Windows 10 computers. Perhaps most crucially, in the year-old Windows 10 operating software, Bing search gets a pole position on the computer home screen in the guise of Microsoft’s Cortana digital assistant. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Under former CEO Steve Ballmer, Microsoft gave up on trying to buy Yahoo and instead reached a deal to make Bing the built-in search engine across Yahoo’s string of websites. It did similar deals to make Bing the default way to query the web on Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Fire gadgets and AOL websites. Microsoft has been aggressive in sticking Bing web search in as many places as possible, boosting the number of web searches and the company’s opportunities to sell ads.

Microsoft’s transformation of its onetime laughingstock could also be a blueprint for the current Microsoft sad-sack product, its smartphone business. But Bing’s slow reversal of fortune is impressive and a credit to three classic Microsoft characteristics: patience, pragmatism and partnerships. Microsoft Corp says it won’t hit its goal of 1 billion devices running Windows 10 by 2018īing’s revenue is still dwarfed by digital advertising giants Google and Facebook.Microsoft says it will start cracking down on ‘terrorist content’ in some of its services.Article content Recommended from Editorial

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