“I wish developing great products was as easy as writing a check. If that was the case, Microsoft would have great products.”
Steve Jobs, Cnet News. May 10, 2007

1. Patterns in Microsoft’s response to competitive threats and opportunities
Standardization and simplification, complementary products, aggressive market penetration strategies (tenacity, deep investments and bundling), aggressive deal making.

If I were to quote Microsoft’s best and most genius strategy that allowed them to gain impressive market share and become virtually impregnable in OS and application software market, it would be standardization (=compatibility) and simplification. They made their products easy to use, switch between and upgrade, which saved their clients a good amount of money in training and re-training employees, equipping new sites, etc. They looked past minor competitive losses in favor of bigger gains that would allow them to ultimately win market share, as in the example when they made their Office package available on Mac OS while Lotus and WordPerfect were hesitant to do so, even though Apple had many products competitive to Microsoft offerings. Another winning strategy was to produce complementary products: OS and applications that were perfectly compatible, as well as making these products available for different PCs and operating systems (=Apple) thus making Microsoft products ubiquitous and omnipresent.
Impressive profits and large cash account further allowed Microsoft to grow into a monster on the computer software arena. What Microsoft has always been famous for was aggressive market penetration strategies that won overwhelming market share. Whoever gets the market share early wins, whoever gets the volume gets the market share, to paraphrase Mark Andreeson, Netscape chief technologist. In Microsoft’s case I think three tactics have helped them to come out on top, let’s call them tenacity, deep investments, and bundling. The story of Microsoft reminds me closely of the story of Pfizer – a giant in pharmaceutical industry with similarly a lot of cash and high market shares and some similar marketing policies. Wealthy status gives you a lot of opportunities to heavily invest and thus “out-invest” your competition, however wealthy status also puts you very much into the spotlight. Just like Microsoft, Pfizer did not always use its power for good, not evil and ended up facing many lawsuits and paying millions in retributions. Afterwards, like Microsoft, Pfizer became extremely legally cautious and restrictive towards its own marketing practices.
Another related aspect of Microsoft’s strategy, which may, in fact, be the company’s main game plan, is taking the market and competitive threats by overwhelming them with its size and bargaining power. I would go further and label this strategy: aggressive deal making. If you cannot outcompete it, buy it! All methods seemed to go into those deals and Microsoft has certainly been ready to loose a little to gain a lot in the process. Some of the examples are: partnering with its competitor Apple to promote its office applications, striking a deal with AOL, also its direct competitor, another examples of this strategy is Microsoft’s deal with Novell Linux and silent threat to other Linux competitors for possible litigation. Finally, Microsoft’s (unsuccessful) attempt to buy Yahoo in 2008 and later striking a deal with Yahoo that continues to cost the company money is another proof of their “bulldozer” strategy in overpowering competitive threats and using any available opportunity for market penetration and growth. A lot of smaller companies simply could not match Microsoft’s force, budget, and their multi-faceted approach: Microsoft was able to invest millions to improve their software to match competition (think Internet Explorer vs. Netscape Navigator), they were able to launch massive campaigns aimed at consumer education (think Windows vs. Linux and current Bing vs. Google campaigns), they were able to strike deals with anyone and everyone. Surely small companies could afford one of those strategies, but never all of them.
If we were to apply our theoretical framework to answer the question of how Microsoft handled competitive threats over years, it is undeniable that they used the all-around approach when it comes to share of market, share of mind and share of heart. They targeted all three time after time, a good example is when in addition to gaining the share of market with competitive differentiation of Windows (vs. Linux) and improvements done to the OS, they also targeted the other two categories through consumer education and heavy promotion of the brand, making Windows almost synonymous with Operating System.
All these strategies seem very effective, and clearly allowed Microsoft to enjoy unprecedented market share in OS and software packages, however, there is one enormous gap I can clearly identify in Microsoft’s approach. Steve Jobs noted it on a few different occasions in several ways (one of which I chose as the quote for this paper.) Microsoft tends to have a very comprehensive, even aggressive approach and kills competition with large investments. But it almost completely misses on employing blue ocean strategy, described by Chan Kim and Renée Maubourgne. Microsoft seems to operate in the red ocean, seeking to steal share within existing industry boundaries, or creating a red ocean out of the blue one (like in the case of IE vs. Netscape Navigator.) As I will explain in the following pieces of this paper, I believe it is that failure to seek blue oceans and pursue true value innovation that still stumps Microsoft search engine success.
2. Microsoft’s competitive disadvantage in Internet search and how it may evolve over time

Let’s first look at hard numbers. If trends develop in the same manner as they had over 2006-08 timeframe, such development does not paint a very pretty picture for Microsoft’s search engine future. Data for search engine market share shows a steady decline in both Yahoo and Microsoft’s share and it is clear that Google is the one taking the share from Microsoft and Yahoo as their share is steadily growing as well as the more specific share of US search queries and search revenues. Similarly, if we look at the operating incomes of various divisions of Microsoft, the two unprofitable ones with negative net income are Online Services and Corporate level activity, the latter containing an element connected with Microsoft online – sales and marketing etc. More recently than 2008 where the case data ends, there has been a lot of boasting coming from Bing executives about recent revenue growth for Microsoft online services. As a matter of fact, between 2011 and 2012 Microsoft surpassed Yahoo in the Explicit Core Search Share as can be seen from the table above. Partly it can be attributed to increased Bing advertising and raising consumer awareness. Microsoft assigned a brand mantra to Bing, advertising it as a “decision engine” with the mission statement of “search engine that brings together the best of search and people in your social networks to help you spend less time searching and more time doing.” On the other hand, it is clear that Microsoft has tried to employ partly the tactics it has historically employed to beat the competition. In my answer to Question 1, I cited two big strategies that Microsoft has traditionally employed: aggressive deal making and aggressive market penetration strategies including hefty investments. Microsoft attempted to buy Yahoo in 2008 in what some considered a desperate attempt to increase market share, I personally believe that rather than being desperate, they are just employing a strategy that has historically worked for Microsoft in the end: the company has a lot of cash and has never been scared to invest it. Instead Microsoft signed a deal with Yahoo to merge their platforms, which finally pushed Bing from the third to the second place after Google.
Another metric that seems very alarming for Microsoft online business is the disparity between cost of business and profit. In the March 2012 quarter, Microsoft's online revenue grew $84 million year over year. In the same March quarter, Microsoft's online cost of revenue grew $292 million. So literally this growth is coming at the cost of disproportionate investment of roughly $4 spent on every dollar of profit.

If we look at the obvious: it seems that Microsoft is playing a loosing game in a growing market. To dig deeper into the roots of Bing’s competitive disadvantage and to formulate projections for the future, I believe we need to answer two questions. First, why has it been so hard, nearly impossible for mighty Microsoft to shake Google in any way, just like it used to do with its former competitors and new market entrants? (Netscape, Linux, Lotus, Apple, etc) The second question is: what reasoning lies behind tenacity with which Microsoft supports its online business despite failure to gain market share and catch up with market leader – Google and despite sunk investments?
To answer the first question, we have to admit that unlike Microsoft’s former competitors and just like Microsoft itself, Google is wealthy and has enough cash to apply a multi-prong approach characteristic of Microsoft’s old tactics to beat Bing. In the past it was the size and the budget of Microsoft and their bargaining power that ultimately overwhelmed its competitors. Well, Google has a hefty cash account and powers of its own, it also has a huge first-to-market lead over Microsoft and due to the nature of the industry I believe the barriers to entry including capital investments and overcoming customer loyalty (according to Porter’s Five Forces) are quite high, which added to Microsoft’s struggle to steal Google’s share.

Even more importantly, Google’s big advantage is clearly to offer continuous innovation. Several times a year there is usually an addition or enhancement to their Google search engine that users are invited to experience. The company clearly employed the blue ocean strategy and offered breakthroughs on many levels, including the search engine itself. Moreover, referring back to Porter’s theoretical framework, after the initial market offering, Google was able to increase value by continuously adding complementary products and services, such as Gmail with its unlimited inbox, Google maps, Google Chrome etc. Others along with Microsoft so far are viewed as copycats not offering any continuous breakthroughs. The perception may be that if you stick with Google your search experience will only get better as time goes. Additionally, while Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s offerings have been and remain fragmented, not necessarily connected with each other, Google made a genius move and pushed in a continuous effort to unite all services offered under one big Google umbrella: email, news, maps etc. One simple example is that all these offering contain the word Google or at least the letter G (Gmail) while Bing, MSN, Hotmail do not appear as unified.
The other issue seems to be all about clicks and partially explains why Microsoft invests all this money to try and raise their market share. According to the case as well as to the Business Insider Online, an online search engine being in the business of selling advertising needs a significant number of queries to increase prices businesses pay for keywords and to earn profit. So it seems a bit of a vicious cycle difficult to break out of: Google has more market share so it generates more traffic, more clicks generate more profit and attract more businesses to increase market share even further. Consequently, with such a huge barrier to market entry initial capital investment that Microsoft is currently incurring seems unavoidable to get to the economies of scale of Internet traffic that would turn the negative operating profits around.
It is clear that Microsoft is battling at least three significant barriers of entry into the search engine industry: economies of scale, enjoyed by Google, as well as Google’s incumbency advantage and initial capital requirements. All three are difficult to conquer, however the history of Microsoft shows they have combated equally dangerous competitive threats and have come out on top. However there is one area that I believe Microsoft has dangerously neglected when it comes to online searching: mobile searches. When we look at the market share data for mobility, the picture looks horrifying for everyone, but Google
US mobile search market share

It is actually quite disturbing and should be so for Microsoft executives how the company missed on the top growth trend in searches: the ones done on tablets and smartphones. Larry Page, Google’s founder, rightfully noted at the 2012 Zeitgeist convention: "I think it's very exciting that everyone in the world is going to get a smartphone now. And for most people in the world it's going to be their first computer." Moreover, Microsoft’s core business is threatened by mobile entrants as much as its online business is, if not more. Microsoft’s first Windows phone is to be released in October 2012, preceded by now six iPhones! Google has dominated this marketplace as the default search engine in many smartphones and tablets and entered mobile OS market itself with Android platform (free) that allowed it to offer advertising and other online services at customers’ fingertips. Failure to capitalize on this initially blue ocean of opportunities and being the very last to the party has hurt Microsoft significantly. That is a paradoxical occurrence given that in his 1995 famed nine page memo to his top team, quoted early in the case, Bill Gates is most intensely concerned about the “scary possibility that Internet fans would … create something less expensive than a PC which is powerful enough for web browsing.” So we can clearly witness that there are powerful threats out their not just to Microsoft’s online advertising business, but to its core business.
I want to offer one more conclusion: we see that Microsoft in 2012 is trying to employ similar strategies to 1992. Perhaps, failure to learn the new tricks and get on with the program this is the main source of their staggering competitive disadvantage. Xerox and Kodak learned it the hard way in prior years. If Microsoft does not restructure their strategy and get together their fragmented offerings or, even better, invests in creativity as much as in grabbing market share (similar to Google that allows its engineers spend one day as week on the project of their choice) it will be one of those paradoxes that fail in an attractive growth market.
3. Why Microsoft is pursuing the market for search and search engines

The most obvious reason for Microsoft to pursue the search engine market is the example of overwhelming financial success of Google right in front of their eyes. At launch of Microsoft search engine, Google was the only serious competitor in this industry, with Yahoo and AOL presenting minor competition, which along with other factors made it a very attractive industry and marketplace for Microsoft to enter. If we look at this opportunity from the point of view of financial accounting: Microsoft was looking at the industry that required minimal investment in plant and equipment, non-existent inventories and favorable payment terms. Because search engine is essentially cloud-based and Microsoft has had infrastructure and a team of engineers already in place, launching into the search engine business has not required much of initial investment and had low to no cost of goods.
According to Exhibit 4 of the case, global search marketing revenues doubled in the past five years while in the U.S. they grew four-fold. Moreover, statistics show that global advertising market has been on the sure path to convert to mostly online advertising since the dawn of Internet. Thus we are looking at industry expansion in two dimensions: online advertising segment is growing as well as the sub-segment of online advertising: search engine advertising is growing within the larger segment. Another recent trend that boosts growth and attractiveness of search engine advertising is strong tendency towards personalization of services including advertising. Search engines present a tremendous opportunity for both data collection on consumer preferences and interest and delivery of results that are just what the customers were looking for to their fingertips. There is also a breadth of marketing methods that could be employed, from originally primitive banners to many different visual possibilities to attract customer and prompt them to spend dollars. Speed of delivery and increased breadth of information and options available at consumers’ fingertips is what spurred such a rapid growth, which is not unreasonable for a ubiquitous company like Microsoft to take advantage of.
Let us look at the attractiveness of the industry from the point of view of Porter’s five forces. As I have mentioned in my analysis earlier, barriers to entry into online search engine advertising industry are high, with most prominent being economies of scale: number of clicks required to attract advertisers, make profit and grow market share, significant capital investment mandated by that, as well as Google’s overwhelming incumbency advantage. On the flipside, however, this creates a low threat of new entrants, and since Microsoft has already secured some market share in this industry it can focus on its offering and compete with Google without worrying about other entrants’ threat. After all, Microsoft at this point is probably one of the only companies that can handle the initial costs of creating and supporting a major search engine. One of the seven barriers of entry is especially worth mentioning in our case: customers switching costs. For advertisers this does play a role, and if they were to switch from Google to Bing they can definitely lose traffic until Bing secures more consumers to use them as the main search engine. But in terms of those consumers there is no cost of switching to them at all! This may explain and justify the tenacity with which Microsoft has been going after Google search engine users first with its “decision engine” campaign and now with Bing It On campaign, where you are offered to compare the two search engines in a series of blind tests, claiming that Bing wins 2:1 over Google.
To go on with our analysis of the five forces shaping this given industry, there is non-existent power of suppliers, which makes Microsoft’s job that much easier. Barriers to entry alone can deter new competitors, so other forces being favorable I believe plays in favor of Microsoft that has already made its presence in the industry. The power of buyers however is probably one of the main obstacles Microsoft is forced to battle every day: there is little differentiation between the products that two search engines offer and buyers can switch at low cost to themselves, so until Microsoft gets differentiation right (which I believe they have not and hence their struggle) this force works against them.
Finally the threat of substitutes is low, internet search can hardly be substituted by going to a library or buying a paper catalogue any more, it is the now and the future of consumer search as well as the most efficient channel for advertising. One caveat here is mobile searches which Microsoft is yet to penetrate: this is undeniably a formidable substitute for traditional online searches done on desktop and laptop operating systems. According to Forbes, market share reports indicate that the Safari browser accounts for two-thirds of mobile web browsing and Safari uses Google as its default search engine, especially in mobile. This segment is completely dominated by Google, which presents a significant threat as well as opens a sizeable opportunity for untapped revenue for Microsoft. Greatest growth in personal computer industry is in tablets and smartphones, which, as I already, mentioned tend to become the first and only personal computing device new consumers own. That is where the greatest growth is and where Microsoft needs to deliver. This deliverable has to come as a package: device and search engine, and why not? Bundling a search engine on upcoming Windows phone as well as potential contracts with other smartphone and tablet producers like Apple, Motorola etc. could allow for leaps in Bing’s market share. So it is quite possible that tenacity with which Microsoft is holding on to Bing despite expense growth far outpacing revenue growth is explained by this upcoming revenue opportunity. According to Business Insider Online, Google does not actually earn profit from licensing Android, its mobile operating platform; the revenues come from searches, maps, Gmail, and other Google services. Microsoft cannot replicate this successful business model without a very efficient search engine.
Another opportunity a widely used search engine presents is reach. Microsoft has a lot of other products and services that it has to sell, and it has to grow its market share worldwide. Because Microsoft is in software business and access to purchasing and downloading its products through a simple search can be instantaneous and reach can expand to all remote parts of the world, promoting Bing that will have delivery of these product offerings at its heart is central to the company’s promotion of their extended suite of products and services.
Another reason for pursuing, or rather, at this point, tenaciously holding on to the search engine piece of business is responding to a competitive threat from Google. Google is now impeding on Microsoft’s core business: software and personal computer services. If Google holds over 60% market share in desktop and laptop searches and a staggering 90% share in mobile searches, what else if not Microsoft’s own search engine can stop Google from using this monopolized position to undermine and diminish competitiveness of Microsoft’s offerings and push through the offerings of its own.
Ultimately if we look at what kind of business strategy Microsoft has always tried to pursue and where the company has won is creating an ecosystem of complementary products: operating system with internet browser, office package etc. In modern world such ecosystem would be incomplete without a powerful search engine. Additionally, cloud technology is slowly but surely replacing software downloads. Bulky downloads demanding space, creating compatibility issues, and overloading computer networks are becoming less and less popular. To give an example from medical field: cloud-based e-prescribing systems are replacing software based ones, because in the cloud-based system a doctor can open such e-prescribing platform from any device, new or old, stationary or portable without having to have that device compatible with software. People who widely criticize Microsoft for holding on to Bing and advise the company to sell it off to Facebook miss the bigger picture: Microsoft is pursuing search engine piece of the market not just to diversify its portfolio and take a bite off of the online advertising pie, but to preserve and protect its core business, the playground for which is changing rapidly such as technology world tends to do.
In conclusion, it is clear to me that pursuing this book of businesses not a frivolous undertaking by a rich technology giant. Of course, some of the reasons behind this pursuit are: attractiveness of the industry with few rivals and high threats to new entrants, rapid growth of the online advertising market as well as the market of mobile internet offerings, opportunities of reach and wide distribution of Microsoft’s existing suite of products and services. However, I believe the very fact that Microsoft refuses to give up on this book of business despite the negative operating income and continues to invest money into it, speaks volumes on paramount importance search engine carries to preserving and growing Microsoft’s rapidly changing core business.
4. Microsoft’s’ strategic options

What strategies would I advise Bing executives to employ? To answer that I think we need to recap and clearly identify the issues the company is currently facing that impede the success of Bing as well as strategic goals that a powerful search engine like Bing will allow Microsoft to achieve. I will divide these into two categories: current search engine’s shortcomings that impede wide success and adoption and bigger goals Bing needs to be designed around.
First let’s talk about what are some of the reasons why Bing has not been able to steal market share from Google. First and foremost, I believe, it is the lack of differentiation. Right now the message sounds more like: “Bing is better, trust us, plus people say so.” But people who use search engines by default are hungry for information, relevant information that is. So Bing creators really need to break it down to their consumers what makes their engine so different. They need to get their Point of Parity and Point of Difference to be clearly defined, not just to the company itself, but also most importantly to its consumers. One of the current most egregious issues with Bing is that it is just not that much different. They need to fully embrace the concept that they are fighting the guys whose brand name is eponymous to “search engine” and “searching”, or, if I were to employ more sophisticated linguistic terminology, whose brand name became a genericized trademark by making the transition from specific to generic or from a proper noun (“Google™”) to a common noun (“let’s google it!”) Bing’s most current promotional campaign “Bing it on!” prompts you to a series of five blind tests demonstrating side-by-side comparison of search results, allowing the user assign a winning side or a “draw”. The claim, or, brand mantra, is that Bing wins against Google 2:1. I took it twice and it was a tie both times, and frankly a few times I was very hard-pressed to assign the winner, because the results were so similar (in one case I searched “Russian women” and assigned a winner to the only page of results containing one (yes only one!) result that did not offer you to mail-order a Russian bride, but actually offered some historical insights on women in Russia.) But I digress; bottom-line is this experiment as well as my research into real differences between the two search engines resulted… well, in not much. I think there are two ways in which Bing can achieve greater differentiation and thus combat the Customer Power Force (out of Porter’s five forces), which, if we recall, gives customers clout if products are standard and undifferentiated. The biggest win would be to achieve services differentiation through uncovering a blue ocean and creating value innovation. It is out of the scope of this paper and a better job for an army of MBA grads and creative engineers to brainstorm ideas on how Bing can offer consumers something entirely different than Google, or, perhaps, offer the same, but in a different innovative method of delivery. However understanding that this is what will help them win and not just re-stating they are slightly better in doing the same thing and throwing some resources at finding out what value innovation they can offer, I believe, is a solid strategy.
The second dimension of differentiation Microsoft should pursue is image differentiation. Speaking of which, from an emotional and image standpoint, Bing It On campaign may not be the worst marketing strategy. It is a fun experience, a great substitute to survey (in one of our earlier discussions I argued that surveys need to be fun to attract people.) If Google users do not find Bing better, well, it is business as usual, but if they do maybe some consumers will switch. Regardless of either, it definitely gets Bing’s name out there in a creative, fun, quiz-like, challenging way. This marketing employs excitement and emotion and emotional marketing is the second strategy I believe Bing needs to employ if it hopes to steal any share from Google in the future. Historically Microsoft has been successful in growing share of mind and heart for its software products to consequently grow the share of market. So where do they fail to do so with Bing? Once I accidentally made MSN my home page. Prior to that, I had never had any Microsoft online exposure, I had never opened a Hotmail account and my Microsoft experience was limited to their office software. I really loved their home page and kept it as my homepage (until upon starting at WPI I turned it into a bit less entertaining blackboard home page), mostly because they offered news in a very easy, fun and entertaining format, like Ten Hidden Travel Gems or Christmas Cocktail Slideshow or Twelve Courageous Animals, you get the idea. I think one of the strategies that is intimately connected with what I noted earlier: need for emotional marketing, could be developing this fun, entertaining, high-energy, young aspect of Microsoft’s search engine. Relevance and quality of search results could be their PoP with Google. Exhibit 5 shows that Relevance metrics of Bing caught up with Google, but by no means exceeded theirs in 2007. The problem with their marketing strategy is that they are using relevance as their PoD. I think it is very hard for them to win in that, empirically it is just not easily proven and people are very attached to Google and have no real complaints about the relevance of its results. It closely reminds of the struggle marketers of Omega watches have had with overcoming perceptions of quality of Rolex. True, Omega watches had the Co-axial technology which if you dig very deep is marginally better than the one Rolex employs, but it is the emotional attachment to Rolex that does not allow Omega to steal share and annihilates any importance of marginal advantage of the Co-axial technology. On the other hand, if Bing looked at Pepsi catching up with its archrival and established industry leader – Coke, they employed this emotional image differentiation, creating a perception that Pepsi is the cola of new generation, of young, energetic spirit, of popular culture. It might be hard for Microsoft to fight for that given that Google owns YouTube, but it is not impossible and could be a breakthrough image differentiation strategy for them.
Moving forward to the second question of what Microsoft could do with Bing to align it with the company’s core goals, I think there should be a two-fold strategy: partnering and capitalizing on mobility. Google has grown in a formidable wealthy industry giant and some companies prominent in other areas criticize and fear Google’s monopolistic business models. Microsoft has traditionally partnered with Apple and made its offerings compatible with Apple products albeit competing with Mac’s OS. Due to Android vs. iOS competition Apple just dropped Google maps from new iOS6 and removed YouTube as a default icon on the screen. This is a big opportunity for Microsoft to come in and position Bing right into Google’s empty nest! Similar competitive offers can be made to other tablet and smartphone makers out there. Secondly, improved reach can allow Bing to move into some untapped (perhaps East-Asian) markets and give Bing a competitive advantage there (similar to what the Swatch Group did with Omega in China)
In conclusion, I think that decision to abandon search engine book of business can hurt Microsoft more than holding on to it is hurting them now. Microsoft’s core business is under the spotlight now and that business model needs to be reworked. I do not think it cannot survive without being a part of the full package: a comprehensive ecosystem offering a powerful search engine. And Microsoft has a great search engine, it may not be better than Google’s, but it is no worse, so with the right differentiation strategies and emotional marketing in addition to rational, I believe Microsoft can crack the code and position Bing to succeed.

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