This sounds like a variant of economies of scale. i.e, it's cheaper when you're dealing in bulk. I haven't heard of this being a problem for large manufacturers

This sounds like a variant of economies of scale. i.e, it's cheaper when you're dealing in bulk. I haven't heard of this being a problem for large manufacturers in the past, I'm not sure why it applies to Google. I do agree that MS is facing difficulty with Bing because they don't have enough signals to generate decent info on what is relevant. But I'm also not convinced that they have the competence to succeed. Disclaimer: I used to work at Microsoft and think their monopoly proceedings that forced browser choice were bunk. But that the integration between Office and Windows was largely correct, but Microsoft was too incompetent to do anything useful with it.