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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

Why does Microsoft keep trying to compete with search. 2 decades of endless money and time wasted. At least it cut its losses with the Zune. Microsoft has tried every possible gimmick to entice people to use Bing..all have failed. This has to be driven by ego and sunk cost fallacy if nothing else.

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Google's desktop market share peaked in 2018 and has very slowly and steadily declined since. There's absolutely no reason for any company in the search game today to sit idly by while this happens. There's a massive opportunity to jump in and differentiate.

Because the market is so incredibly huge, and Google has ~90% of it, even one or two percent on desktop alone amounts to billions of dollars of revenue.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/725388/microsoft-corpora... https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-....

Because as more attention/money goes to other tech ecosystems, it weakens their position in the market. The computing world used to revolve around Windows/Office, now it's increasingly a tangential legacy player. It used to be that you bought a Windows PC to run Office and other Windows apps. These days it's just the way they get to the web for many... and only on desktop/laptop devices. Microsoft knows they have to remain relevant or their future will increasingly look like Intel's.

Search is the entry gate to an ecosystem. You capture attention in a highly frequent, highly sticky action, and historically profitable area - you are set up to land and expand (gmail, gcal, etc).

Google took Microsoft's lunch. Windows used to be that entry gate and they're looking to reclaim it. I think it's a sound strategy.

Because even though it has less users than Google, it is profitable

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