Every Windows Phone that’s been sold to date has a dedicated search key on the bottom of the device that when pressed loads up Microsoft’s search engine, Bing. According to the analysts at comScore, as of October 2011 Bing has roughly 15% market share in the United States when it comes to search engines. That’s actually pretty high compared to other parts of the world, especially Russia, where Bing is estimated to have just 1% of the market; meanwhile the market leader, Yandex, sees 60% of the country’s searches going through their engine. What’s Microsoft to do, continue pushing their rejected internet service in people’s faces, or partner with the big boys? Well, according to a press release that was published the day after Thanksgiving so that no one would notice, Microsoft has decided to transform the “Bing button” to a “Yandex button”.
“Launching Windows Phone in Russia, our goal was to provide our customers in this country with the latest version of a mobile operating system integrated with the most popular local web services and social networks. Now we are pleased to announce that the services of our strategic partner Yandex will appear on a wide range of smartphones supporting Windows Phone.” — Anna Kulashova, Director of Mobile Carriers and Service Providers Development at Microsoft
Wait a minute, if Microsoft’s goal is to provide their customers with the most popular local web services, then why don’t they offer an option to let Google take over the “Bing button”? Google’s search engine market share in America is a little over 65%, which is more than what Yandex has in Russia, yet Microsoft is still forcing folks to go with Bing. That’s just not cool. We don’t mind Microsoft trying to get people to use their services, but they should at least let customers choose what happens when they click the search button on their device.
It just seems like the right thing to do.