NY Times: Microsoft Tried To Unload Bing On Facebook

benfrog writes "According to a blog posting on the New York Times site, Microsoft tried to sell the perpetual money-losing Bing to Facebook 'over a year ago' (the article cites 'several people with knowledge of the discussions who didn't want to be identified talking about internal deliberations'). Steve Ballmer, apparently, was not involved or consulted. Facebook politely declined. Neither Microsoft or Facebook would comment on the rumors."

Re:Who wouldn't want Bing?

[Anonymous Coward]

It worked really well for XBOX too.

There's nothing wrong with taking the view that one day the XBox may get to the position of having a positive return across its lifespan. And it is genuinely a positive about Microsoft that they're willing to engage in longterm plans. But the idea that it has already worked out well is just crap. The XBox project hasn't made back anything like what it's cost.

Re:Companies do this all the time

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahhh, the Microsoft Shill again...

Re:Intragam

[rgbrenner]

Google also had millions of users who didn't pay anything, with no business model before Schmidt came on board and turned them into an advertising company.

Wow, that's revisionist. Schmidt was at Novell when Adwords was launched.. nearly a year before scmidt became CEO (and 6 months before he even worked at google).

Google does not give away its product for free. Its product is advertising space.

Re:Companies do this all the time

[Anonymous Coward]

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Re:Companies do this all the time

[Anonymous Coward]

There's been a steady stream of new user accounts, usually with "Tech" in the name, posting lengthy pro-Microsoft/anti-Google posts with the same timestamp as the story itself. None of the accounts are subscribers, so the comments are clearly pre-written. The writing style is similar. The comment is promptly upmodded to +5 before slowling falling to something else. The user's karma eventually gets borked, and a new account appears shortly thereafter. Some think it's "bonch", but I'm not so sure.

I'm sure shilling goes on in many places, but this particular person is so obvious and persistent that it gets really obnoxious.