With Steve Ballmer's announced retirement, the tech world has been debating his legacy. While some products released during his tenure as CEO have been universally panned - Windows Vista has few fans - others have received more mixed opinions.
One such product is Bing, Microsoft's rebooted search engine which was launched in 2009. In CNN's list of hits and misses during the Ballmer era, Bing was listed in the "hit" column. In the video below, Fool analysts Eric Bleeker, Jamal Carnette, and Simon Erickson look at whether Bing could actually be classified as a hit.
While the product is now competitive with Google, the problem is that Microsoft took so long to create viable competition in search. During that time Google built a nearly insurmountable lead. While Google's search market share is closer to 66% in the United States, in many other countries it stands above 90%. Ultimately, products must be judged by their impact on the bottom line, and with Microsoft's online services division having posted $16 billion in losses across the past five years, Bing falls into the "miss" column instead of being known as a hit.
To see our analyst's discussion on the history of Bing, watch the video below.
