Search engine marketing on Bing will always have an audience, thanks to an announcement from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
Speaking at the 2010 CES event in Las Vegas, Ballmer stated that Bing will be the default search provider for all of Hewlet Packard’s devices in 42 countries. This is an extension of a previous deal with Hewlett Packard, which saw the PC manufacturer ship all of its 2009 PC’s with the Live Search toolbar preinstalled.
Microsoft aims to continue and expand upon this arrangement with Live Searches successor, Bing. The new system replaced Live Search across the company’s hosted websites and applications in June 2009.
Partnerships with PC manufacturers is one of the few areas where Microsoft holds the advantage in securing search engine marketing share. Unlike its largest competitor, Google, the incumbent leader of search engine audience share, Microsoft is in a strong position to make deals regarding pre-installed software and settings. The overwhelming majority of commercial PC’s are packaged with a version of the company’s popular Windows OS.
An additional feature of the partnership is that all HP machines will have the MSN portal as their default homepage. This site has a prominent Bing search function as well as news and links to the company’s other services, such as hotmail. Many people believe that a large part of Microsoft’s large audience depends on its positioning as the default provider of services and software. For example, whilst Internet Explorer remains the most popular internet browser in the world, it has fallen from an overwhelming market share to around 60% in just a few years, loosing ground to applications such as Mozilla Firefox (29%) and even Google Chrome (4%).
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