Category: Microsoft

When Bing was launched in the middle of last year, it was touted to be a “decision engine” – a tag that Microsoft sought to differentiate their website from “search engines” like Google. Close to a year later and with over $100 million spent on marketing the website, the company is still fighting Google in the search engine space. However, the good thing is that the market share is growing, if not dramatically, at least gradually.

According to a recent study by Hitwise, Bing has been inching towards the 10% market share – pretty impressive though this does include the market share that would have otherwise belonged to Microsoft Live and the likes.

Here is how the market share of Bing has grown in the past couple of months

Jun ’09 : 5.25%
Jul ’09 : 8.02%
Aug ’09 : 9.48%
Sep ’09 : 8.96%
Oct ’09 : 9.57%
Nov ’09 : 9.34%
Dec ’09 : 8.92%
Jan ’10 : 9.37%
Feb ’10 : 9.70%

Microsoft is the second largest private employer in the American state of Washington and its impact on the local economy cannot be underestimated. A recent study by University of Washington makes several interesting observations on the economic impact Microsoft has had on the region.

Here are some interesting notes (numbers for 2008 unless specified)

13.6% of gross state product in Washington was contributed by Microsoft. That’s $43.84 billion
$7 billion in worker compensation ($1.6 billion more than entire aerospace industry)
39,300 local employees (Behind Boeing’s 76,400)
28.5% of jobs created in Washington state since 1990 are attributable to Microsoft
Average employee compensation (without stock options) : $152,212
Average employee compensation (with stock options) : $178,159
Microsoft expenditure on local goods and services : $2.15 billion
Microsoft total contribution to Washington economy : $9.16 billion

Microsoft continues to dominate the desktop and laptop operating system space with close to 92% market share for its Windows suite of operating system. Eight years after its release, Windows XP is still the leader though its market share is fast reducing thanks to increasing proliferation of Windows 7. Here is the latest market share listing of the operating systems according to Net Applications

Windows XP : 67.77%
Windows Vista : 17.87%
Windows 7 : 5.71%
Mac OS 10.5 : 2.47%
Mac OS 10.6 : 1.60%
Linux : 1.0%

Windows Operating System remains the most critical part of Microsoft’s business despite the several new businesses Redmond has ventured into of late. Here are the numbers from the latest quarter

Total revenue for Microsoft in Q4 ’09 : $19.02 billion
Revenue from sale of Windows 7 : $1.71 billion
Overall Revenue from Windows (including Windows Live) : $6.9 billion

Total number of Windows 7 licenses sold till date : 60 million

Microsoft acquired Hotmail from Sabeer Bhatia in 1997 and since then competition from the likes of Gmail and Yahoo Mail has meant the Hotmail is no longer as popular as it once was. But fact be told, Hotmail is still mammoth and here are some interesting facts about the service

Number of languages : 36
Number of regional markets worldwide : 59
Total number of inboxes : 1.3 billion
Monthly unique users : 350 million
Total number of emails processed in a day : 3 billion
Total number of spams filtered in a day : 1 billion
Email Storage capacity deployed by Microsoft : 155 petabytes (155,000 terabytes)
Growth in storage capacity per month : 2 petabytes (2000 terabytes or 2 million GB)
Storage Capacity consumed by attachment (photos, documents) : 70%

Razorfish, the advertising agency that belonged to Microsoft has been acquired by Publicis Groupe. Here are the details regarding the deal:

Value of the deal : $530 million
$300 million to be paid in cash by Publicis
Microsoft to get hold of 3% stake in Publicis

Razorfish annual revenue estimate : $380 million
Razorfish employee count : 2000

Windows fell below the 90 percent mark for the very first time in October. Here is the share of the top three operating systems on the web:

Windows : 89.69%
Mac : 8.82%
Linux : 0.82%