The problem for Microsoft is the same problem that faced Apple. Being "as good as" isn't enough to get people to switch. You have to be 10 times better.
Back when Google launched, it was 10x better than Yahoo. Bing seems to have quickly gotten to 1x, but hasn't moved much further.
And, what if I could select my settings in a dropdown when searching. So, maybe the people at HN setup a whitelist of 100 of the best sites for programming help. I add this list to my account. Now, anytime I want to search for a programming question, I type in the query, select my custom search type from the dropdown, 'programming questions', and then click search. I'll only get results from those 100 sites.
Google will never implement this for a variety of reasons, so it's room for competition.
Pretty much: Apple was faced with a competitor who owned a vast majority of the PC market. They never took over the majority, but they managed to earn a profit from a minority of people who were willing to pay a premium for computers that worked better than the crapware offered by most Windows OEMs. Windows was cheap, and just good enough to write TPS reports.
Google now offers similar crapware: heavily-gamed and -"personalized" search results slathered with ads and just good enough to be better than most alternatives. There's plenty of room for a company to offer something better: paid subscription search, less-complete search with fewer ads and more accuracy, or something else (I'm not a "10x founder," so I can't think of these things.).
If the last web site you visited was for the Audubon Society and the next thing you search for is Cardinals you will get a page about birds on the first result, but if you had just recently looked for tickets to a ball game on Ticketmaster you will get the baseball team as your first result.
One of the more fascinating things that DDG's "Dontbubbleme" campaign did, was expose just how big a swing in the results your 'meta data' has. People who are running Chrome and are "logged into Google" get very different results than people who make a query with no context following them around.
In the latter case everyone has to resort to giving you the pages that "most" people clicked on from your geographic region [1].
Bing and Google have pretty much exact equivalence if you remove tracking and geo context. (IP blind / cookie blind / search).
[1] For even more fun, set up proxy servers in various data centers around the country and do searches with no cookies or context, and proxied to different geographies. Very enlightening.
It's not like you need to buy an entirely new computer and learn to use a new operating system to switch between Bing and Google.
We're in the predictable phase where everyone hates google now because they're no longer the next big thing, but I'm not a hipster and I don't think microsoft is now the underdog so I don't get the google animosity and I don't get the sudden warmth towards microsoft.
Quite frankly I fucking hate windows, and I wish it would just go away entirely. To that end I avoid giving microsoft money at every opportunity.