You Can Lead a Horse to Water, But You Can’t Make Him Bing!

You get the idea though the metaphor is purposely mangled. Microsoft is now finding out that quick pushes, like paying people to use a search, er… decision engine, is only going to get so far.

Unless you keep jacking up the money.

Since that doesn’t seem to be happening, the losses of search numbers are starting to show up.

from AllThingsD

Microsoft’s efforts to bolster Bing’s market share are no longer paying off as well as they have been. After months of slight but steady increases in market share, Bing’s percentage of the search market in the United States and abroad fell in September for the first time.

New metrics from Web analytics firm StatCounter show Bing’s share of the U.S. search market in September falling to 8.5 percent from 9.6 percent in August. Its share of the global market declined as well, slipping to 3.25 percent from 3.58 percent.

Microsoft’s (MSFT) new search partner, Yahoo (YHOO), also suffered a decline. Its market share fell to 9.4 percent from 10.50 percent in the U.S. and to 4.37 percent from 4.84 abroad. Meanwhile, Google’s (GOOG) September share rose to 80 percent from 77.8 percent in the U.S. and to 90.54 percent from 90 percent globally.

While this is only one month of downturn, and not what can be called a long term trend, it shows that buying opinions, or buying usage, in this case, seldom works.

Microsoft seems, though it has lots of money, and a long history, to be unwilling to let the market work, make incremental changes to improve Bing!, and allow the world to take notice.

Perhaps Mr. Ballmer should use his decision engine engine to look up the benefits of patience.

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time for a reboot of Bing?