Josh OngMicrosoft is working with outside developers to raise awareness of its Bing app, according to Nick Wingfield of The Wall Street Journal. In recent weeks, the Redmond, Wash.-based company says, as many as seven apps at once, each with Bing in their names, have held top positions on the iPhone App Store's most downloaded free app lists.
Most of the third-party apps, which are sponsored by Microsoft, allow users to listen to popular music for free, provided they download the Bing app first. The apps have names like "Ryan Seacrest's MixTapes by Bing" and "Bing Hip Hop 100."
According to a person familiar with Microsoft's strategy, the push is meant to "crack the code" of the App Store. Many of the third-party apps are being advertised on mobile advertising networks.
A spokesman for Microsoft acknowledged the campaign and its effectiveness. “It turns out if you have more than one of these apps at the upper-end of the store, you see decent lift across all of them,†Adam Sohn said.
Although Microsoft is currently reworking its mobile phone OS, with Windows Phone 7 due out "before the holidays," the company is still committed to marketing its search product on competing mobile platforms. In addition to courting iPhone users, Microsoft is looking to capture some of the Android search market. An official Bing app for Android is nearing completion.
“It’s all about building a great service and making it as broadly available as possible,†said Sohn.
Andrew Orr
Wesley Hilliard
Malcolm Owen
Christine McKee
William Gallagher
29 Comments
Since Google and Verizon started divvying the internet up amongst themselves I have seriously considered switching to Bing. Maybe it's time to bury the hatchet with beleaguered Microsoft and give them a chance.
Good for MS. Bing is a good search engine, but it's no google. MS has been pushing hard with their online version of office, redesign of hotmail, etc For me though google is still better both in search and in other functions like mail, docs, calendars, maps.
I believe Bing is now Yahoo's search engine, which is interesting because Google used to be their search engine before they split off and got big I believe. We'll see if Yahoo's mail and news properties will propel Bing's market share.
Ever since Google attempted to screw over the entire internet with regard to Net Neutrality, I've been using Bing exclusively as my search provider and Yahoo as my email service. I'd been contemplating a switch anyway, since it's just not wise to give one company access to too much of your information.
Bing works great, and the switch has been totally painless. Maybe it's time Microsoft did more than advertise and started using some shady dealings like they did back in the monopoly days to get their product pushed in front of more people. The more we can shrink Google, the better the competition between the companies will be, which is all the better for us.
Bing is terrible. I tried a couple searches on Java and Linux and got back terrible non-relevant results. So back to Google which gives me good results almost every time. Plus, Google is not a convicted Monopolist (like Microsoft) who thwarts interoperability at every step of the way via their proprietary, patent encumbered file formats and protocols. Nor does Google copy everything Apple does. No thanks Microsoft.
Google has been up to a lot of nastiness lately. Using Bing now and I seriously want to see more competition in search. Would be nice to have 10 choices in Safari for default search in the future. My gmail has been relegated to junk status and I dropped google cals and am now using MobileMe (which I like better). Dropping out of a whole a bunch of other google apps as well. Meh! Their beta apps are overrated anyway so it's no hardship. YouTube is still getting a lot of use and I gave my google voice number out to a bunch of people so I'll keep that going for now but I look forward to a "google lite" future.