...so much money...
-- Judge Learned Hand (1872-1961), Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals
(I don't buy the conspiracy theories that Elop was a Microsoft mole sent in to do exactly that. I never attribute to conspiracy what can be attributed to staggering incompetence)
after the world set (for google, thanks more for universities putting search boxes on their sites, more than algorithms) they could do absolutely anything. launch free email with 1gb? disregard ads and only allow text ads?
they did everything wrong by the book and are still huge. So i doubt excite could have screwed it up. well, they could have screwed the university fan-base... but that is about it.
I mean, yes, Google's percentage of total Web search is embarassingly huge (north of 80%, or is it 85%, last I checked). But the user lock-in is slight.
Advertiser lock-in is where I strongly suspect the action is, where Google offers both networks and tools which appeal to online ad buyers in a fashion that's difficult or impossible to match.
It felt like there were a few years lost, spent just injecting and removing tiers of middle managers.
Not that it's ginormous, but for example, eBay never really happened in Japan because Yahoo Auctions was already a thing.
Yahoo Japan also runs an ISP
But Taiwan only has ~23m people vs Japan's ~130m...
Microsoft has been losing, at most, a few billion[2] a year on Bing. Assuming they've spent $45B since 2009, that's $6.4B per year spent on Bing. A net loss of $2B on Bing would mean Microsoft is making $4.4B per year, which isn't in the ballpark.
1. http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-microsoft-on...
2. http://hal2020.com/2013/01/18/about-that-2b-annual-loss-from...
Buying a company costs a lot more than the purchase price. Due diligence, regulatory compliance, legal expenses, HR expenses, lost productivity due to changes, employee turnover, and other factors put a huge premium on top of that price.
Plus, a company that you buy has its own cash-flows, assets, and liabilities, and those might be costly, too. It's not always a good idea to buy a ship that's slowly sinking.
I think Microsoft has done incredibly well without Yahoo, and it's also using Bing in interesting ways that don't require direct competition with Google (powering Cortana, for example).