14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is currently the only company that at least hopes to get closer to Google and compete against the Mountain View-based firm in search, and until now, plans to do this are advancing quite nicely.
The software giant revealed when announcing Q3 FY2016 results that search advertising revenue improved by 18 percent during the quarter, mostly thanks to Windows 10, as more people made the move to the new operating system.
Here’s how it goes. Windows 10 comes with Bing as the default search engine while also offering Cortana (which, in turn, is powered by Bing and uses the same search engine for looking online for information) on both PCs and smartphones. The more people use Windows 10, the bigger the revenue of Bing, and at this point, Microsoft says that at least 270 million customers run Windows 10.
“We see this trend across our enterprise customers with 83 percent of them in active pilots today. We believe enterprise deployments will continue to drive up the over 270 million monthly active devices running Windows 10. The number of Windows 10 devices is twice that of Windows 7 over the same time period since launch,” CEO Satya Nadella announced in a conference call with analysts.
But as far as search is concerned, Bing is quickly catching up with Google, and according to comScore data, Microsoft’s search engine already has a 21 percent market share in the United States.
Windows 10, Bing’s secret weapon
Microsoft says that Windows 10 accounts for 35 percent of all search revenue recorded last month, so it’s very clear that the company uses the new operating system as the main weapon in the fight against Google.
“In search developers have already built over a thousand apps designed for Cortana. These new third party experiences and the 6.3 billion questions people have asked are helping make Cortana smarter and driving search engagement. Over 35 percent of our search revenue last month came from Windows 10 devices,” Nadella explained.
Without a doubt, Microsoft will push more and more for Windows 10 adoption, especially because we’re approaching the end of free upgrade offer, but at the same time, the number of enterprises starting the migration to the OS will also help improve Bing.
Microsoft has a goal of bringing Windows 10 on a total of 1 billion devices by 2017, and if this plan succeeds, then Bing can finally become the rival that Google has never had.