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> We periodically assess the value and pricing of our services to meet market demands and align the pricing of our products and services with customer consumpti

> We periodically assess the value and pricing of our services to meet market demands and align the pricing of our products and services with customer consumption trends and preferences. It's only natural that when your search product has been making headlines for being untrustworthy, inaccurate, and creepy/threatening that you'd start charging excessive amounts for access to it. I'm sure all their data on "customer consumption preferences" indicate that consumers prefer paying higher and higher prices to consume products of questionable value.

nerdponx 4y ago
I assume this is a deliberate strategic shift to push out a large portion of their customers while extracting more value from the remaining customers. What's unclear is whether this is a purely mechanical decision to maximize value extracted from the customer base (it's easy to construct scenarios in which it's more profitable to serve fewer customers at higher prices), or if this is some kind of move towards brand protectionism by making Bing search seem more exclusive, or if it's actually just really expensive to run an LLM behind every single search query. Or it's an attempt to kill off DuckDuckGo and drive people towards using Bing directly.
- jfoster 4y ago
  > or if it's actually just really expensive to run an LLM behind every single search query. It's definitely expensive to run an LLM behind every single search query, but it doesn't seem like these changes are related to that, with the exception of the "Information on a new way to use the Bing APIs: Bing API Pricing with Large Language Models " section below the rest of the pricing changes.
- weberer 4y ago
  >Or it's an attempt to kill off DuckDuckGo and drive people towards using Bing directly. I didn't even consider that. That would be truly evil of them.
  - aembleton 4y ago
    DDG has had ample time to develop their own index. If they're still reliant upon Bing, then poor decision making by DDG, not an evil Bing.
  - brookst 4y ago
    Are you saying Microsoft has some kind of moral obligation to ensure the success of DDG, even if it’s not aligned with Microsoft’s interests? That seems odd. DDG is a for-profit company. Microsoft is a for-profit company. Why is DDG entitled to service?
    - jsnell 4y ago
      If the motivation is specifically to kill DDG, that'd be bad. If the motivation is that the search API business is not profitable right now, they need to raise prices to be viable, and it's incidental that DDG can't be viable at those prices, that's fine. (Why would it not be profitable any more? Maybe it never was, and they've been selling the API access at below cost to try to effectively buy the query stream and get scale that way. Maybe they're planning to massively improve search quality, and the costs will go up.)
      - brookst 4y ago
        No professionally-managed company has emotional reactions like wanting to “kill” a company. Bing has, what, 3% market share? Why in the world would they invest energy in trying to help someone else carve out 1%?
bboygravity 4y ago
TLDR: Microsoft

nerdponx 4y ago

I assume this is a deliberate strategic shift to push out a large portion of their customers while extracting more value from the remaining customers. What's unclear is whether this is a purely mechanical decision to maximize value extracted from the customer base (it's easy to construct scenarios in which it's more profitable to serve fewer customers at higher prices), or if this is some kind of move towards brand protectionism by making Bing search seem more exclusive, or if it's actually just really expensive to run an LLM behind every single search query. Or it's an attempt to kill off DuckDuckGo and drive people towards using Bing directly.

jfoster 4y ago
> or if it's actually just really expensive to run an LLM behind every single search query. It's definitely expensive to run an LLM behind every single search query, but it doesn't seem like these changes are related to that, with the exception of the "Information on a new way to use the Bing APIs: Bing API Pricing with Large Language Models " section below the rest of the pricing changes.
weberer 4y ago
>Or it's an attempt to kill off DuckDuckGo and drive people towards using Bing directly. I didn't even consider that. That would be truly evil of them.
- aembleton 4y ago
  DDG has had ample time to develop their own index. If they're still reliant upon Bing, then poor decision making by DDG, not an evil Bing.
- brookst 4y ago
  Are you saying Microsoft has some kind of moral obligation to ensure the success of DDG, even if it’s not aligned with Microsoft’s interests? That seems odd. DDG is a for-profit company. Microsoft is a for-profit company. Why is DDG entitled to service?
  - jsnell 4y ago
    If the motivation is specifically to kill DDG, that'd be bad. If the motivation is that the search API business is not profitable right now, they need to raise prices to be viable, and it's incidental that DDG can't be viable at those prices, that's fine. (Why would it not be profitable any more? Maybe it never was, and they've been selling the API access at below cost to try to effectively buy the query stream and get scale that way. Maybe they're planning to massively improve search quality, and the costs will go up.)
    - brookst 4y ago
      No professionally-managed company has emotional reactions like wanting to “kill” a company. Bing has, what, 3% market share? Why in the world would they invest energy in trying to help someone else carve out 1%?

bboygravity 4y ago

TLDR: Microsoft