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Bing has proved to be one of the best investments that Microsoft ever made.

Ballmer's failure as it related to Bing was trying to build an advertising platform to compete with Google and failing.

Genuine question - how is Bing a good investment? Isn't it essentially a non-factor in the search market?

My guess is the algorithms and infrastructure serve search functions across all of their products. The "search market" is really the "Display advertising" market, and sure, they suck at that because no one goes to bing. But bing isn't worthless.

I've lost trust on them the day they were busted copying results directly from Google (https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/)

It's a huge guinea pig for .net, windows server, and azure - a perfect example of eating your own dog food.

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