Frankly I'm surprised that they keep sinking money into this, they've clearly failed to establish a profitable beach head, meanwhile google is making money hand

Frankly I'm surprised that they keep sinking money into this, they've clearly failed to establish a profitable beach head, meanwhile google is making money hand over fist in the exact same domain. Well, what else are they going to do? It's very clear that in the foreseeable technological future, search will continue to be an immensely important lynchpin of all sorts of services. Microsoft are in this because they realize that. You can't walk away from this table, however much you're losing. Bing is definitely going to be bouyed by the Xbox, Windows Mobile and Windows 8 integration, so that's good. FWIW, I like Bing, and I want them to do well. The results aren't as good as Google's yet, but their ancillary properties, like image search are pretty good. Video search is certainly better than Google's half-baked offering.