Option 1:
Bing users are more susceptible to advertising and Microsoft gets 55% more click throughs than Google with 1/13th as many impressions (from the article)
Option 2:
Click fraud on Bing is very high compared to Google.
The alternative is that capitalism works, but can take some time.
Microsoft has a lot of cash which is why it is still so strong. It's current products are coming under increasing pressure from open source, the web etc. So this may not last forever - unless of course they get a bailout.
And, uh, I have the pleasure of working now with a huge data warehouse that hasn't normalized status codes, so instead of quickly searching for an integer, the queries run slow as hell scanning char fields. It's not good.
That's a problem that can easily be fixed. Replace the char fields with the int's you so crave, maybe adding any missing indexes (indices?)
Do it once and enjoy the results (and speed) forever.
The primary function of the design engineer is to make things difficult for the fabricator and impossible for the serviceman.
