Microsoft's lack of investment in critical areas of its search technology has been exposed in recent testimonies from company executives who revealed the search team at Microsoft was a fraction of Google's and their efforts to move into the mobile browser market were delayed.
Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s chief of advertising and web services, testified in the latest big tech antitrust lawsuit last week, Reuters reported. According to his testimony, Microsoft did not sufficiently invest in expanding its search team, which was only about 10% the size of Google's search team. While he tried to blame this on scalability, Google has a strong history of prioritizing investments in a skilled and extensive team to enhance search engine developments.
Parakhin also revealed that Microsoft neglected to invest in growing its index for a decade after the launch of Bing. It wasn’t until 2019 that the company began the lengthy process to grow its index. The company also did not address latency issues, according to Parakhin, who admitted that the company's latency is “maybe slightly worse” than Google on desktop and “significantly worse” on mobile, resulting in a lower quality and less-competitive search product.
Microsoft's testimony also revealed a lack of investment in mobile search, despite their executives arguing for guaranteed distribution. Parakhin discussed Microsoft's discussions with Apple to become their default search engine and admitted that Bing had not invested enough in mobile search quality. He framed their offer as a gradual process, saying to Apple, "If you'll give us a chance, we can start growing traffic on mobile, and then we will invest more into mobile, and then we can gradually get mobile up to the same quality as desktop." Parakhin also conveyed that without a firmer guarantee of distribution, it was uneconomical for Microsoft to invest in mobile quality and search mode.
Jonathan Tinter, the corporate vice president of the M365 and SAN Business Development team at Microsoft, also testified in court. During his testimony, he presented a 2016 chart indicating Bing's mobile improvements resulting from investments in localization, enhancing mobile-friendliness and advancements in indexing, natural language processing and semantic ranking. However, when questioned about why these investments were not made prior to 2016, he did not provide a definitive response.
Tinter also revealed that in 2010, Microsoft recognized the need to develop a browser experience that could retain users to compete with Safari. However, it took the company seven years to introduce a mobile browser. Tinter admitted that "Chrome was outpacing Microsoft in feature innovation." Additionally, he mentioned that Microsoft Edge was built upon Google's open-source Chromium platform and that Edge represented an improvement over Internet Explorer.