Clouds over Microsoft

Summary: Musiwave terminated after Microsoft acquisition, security/identity integration delayed, search falls

A FEW days ago we showed that Microsoft eliminated two more products, followed by yet another. That's a lot of dead products in less than one week and here is Microsoft merging another and eliminating an old service in the process.

To make matters worse, this report from IDG gives yet more examples of a bundle of existing delays.

Microsoft is on the verge of finally providing some pieces of software to back up its ambitious plan to integrate its security and identity technologies, but the company admits it is moving slower than it had anticipated.

Another undelivered promise is progress in search, the lack of which has had Microsoft lose billions of dollars.

The other day we wrote about figures from StatCounter. Although these cannot be verified, they do offer some relative insight into the continued failure of Microsoft in the search business. The report from IDG concentrates on US-only figures, as usual, as though this has more considerable impact then anything else which is measured.

The new numbers, compiled by online metrics firm StatCounter, show Bing dropping to 8.47 percent of the U.S. market in September. That's a fall of 1.17 percent from its position in August.

From another source comes the estimate which shows Google exceeding 90% in global market share.

StatCounter also said global search share for Bing and Yahoo also declined. Bing slipped to 3.3 percent from 3.6 percent, while Yahoo dipped to 4.4 percent from 4.8 percent. Google's global share remained at 90.5 percent.

That cannot make Microsoft particularly pleased. ⬆

"Every time you use Google, you're using a machine running the Linux kernel."

--Chris DiBona, Google

"I'm going to f---ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f---ing kill Google."

--Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO