I'm not judging the business model's merits, but selling exclusive access to content is nothing new.

"It starts with the developers - we are the ones that create the software that start the market that feed the companies that buy into Microsoft's bull. Vote by code. Stand by it."

You're confusing Microsoft the software company with Microsoft the advertising company. This has absolutely nothing to do with developers.

Ideally there would be no manipulative tactics at all, and all competing entities would do so by merit and product improvement alone. In this case all possible actions would be additive to total output.

Microsoft's tactics of destructive manipulation however is the worst you can get.

I'm not judging the business model's merits, but selling exclusive access to content is nothing new.

I'm coming at this from a completely different angle, which is entirely unfair (:P), but the big difference is that moving a closed-source, inherently-system-dependent piece of software onto another system against the will of the original developers is notably non-trivial, while ignoring a robots.txt file is a fairly straightforward exercise.

If this would-be "exclusivity" comes to pass, it won't last for very long. Even if above-board companies like Microsoft and Google continue to play by the nominal rules, something vaguely similar to the Pirate Bay is bound to pop up eventually, especially when such a massive, glaring hole in the market is present. I mean, what good is a search engine that doesn't even search properly?

Either way, the majority of all new traffic comes from Google right now, and if a website has exclusivity for Bing, it would surely lose a lot visits. And it's definitely not worth it unless Microsoft pays really well for this privilege ... and I'm not sure they can do that, even if they are Microsoft.

OK, so let's assume this will work, for this reason, and game it out. I don't hold up the following analysis as Truth, just some thoughts.

In the short term, even for several years, Microsoft could match any revenues to a news company that it chose. In the long term, though, the news company faces two outcomes: Bing essentially succeeds, and Bing essentially fails. In the first case, they essentially win and everything's hunky-dory. In the second case, they lose any independent market existence they have and become a Microsoft vassal, dependent on the Microsoft payoff to survive on the net.

So, taking this offer from Microsoft is effectively betting that Microsoft can successfully dethrone Google and beat them at their core competency. As a person interested in the software industry who has watched Microsoft thrash around in numerous fields over the past couple of decades, and scoring only one modest success outside of Windows and Office in that time frame (the games division, which still isn't in the Office/Windows league by any means), this is not a bet I'd care to make. I have no idea how a news company would see this, though.

(BTW, I'm judging "success" by "profit". Very few things at Microsoft make money. I believe the XBox division did finally break even fairly recently, and that makes them a rarity, and I could be misremembering.)

It seems to me it's going to be hard to convince a company to be the first to jump ship. "Hard" here of course mostly means "will take more money", but still, to pull this off successfully it seems like Microsoft will need to get not just one news organization, but several, and match it up with a very big, very expensive advertising campaign to boot.

It might work... but it seems to me it's more like a "Hail Mary" than a sound plan. But Hail Marys do sometimes work; I'm not saying it's impossible.

Also, while they may not have produced many successes over 3 decades of platform wars, they have certainly ruined many competitors.

Other things may "sell" well, but nothing else makes money.

That's how profitable Office and Windows are.

Incidentally, if you've ever wondered why Microsoft is so willing to go to bat for Windows or Office lockin, this is why. They are a mighty edifice built on two things, and if either one of them fails they are in for a world of hurt. This does put them ahead of Google, though, which is a mighty edifice built on one thing, ads.

This probably also explains why Microsoft might be willing to pump a lot of money into this task; cutting off Google's traffic cuts off their ads, which cuts off their Windows quasi-replacement (their new OS stuff) and their Office replacement (Google Docs). If Google was just sitting there, raking in dough from online ads, but had no OS or Google Docs, Microsoft would probably be content to just watch them, but Google really is a huge existential threat to Microsoft, who really is in a much more insecure position than it may seem if you just read the bottom line on the balance sheet.

There's regularly stories about it being "profitable" but they generally mean that they stopped making a yearly loss. Seldom, if ever, do they ask if and when the cumulative yearly profits gave a suitable Return on Investment.

While Google is a company that produces a lot of innovative technology, operates a service and infrastructure that is highly useful; I wouldn't consider it strictly necessary.

What is more frightening to me, is the net neutrality war - if Google goes down, the internet remains. If freedom of the internet goes down, a very large portion of the internet will not remain (it could persist through Freenet &c... though).

Well to be fair, these morons were initially threatening to do remove themselves from Google for free!