Windows 10 is not Bing's savior
You would think that, as Windows 10's adoption takes off, Bing's market share would follow suit. The search engine is an integral part of the new operating system, being used, for instance, in Cortana and the new default browser, Microsoft Edge. Yet, since Windows 10's debut on July 29, Bing is no more popular than before.
According to a new report by comScore, Bing's US market share has seen only a modest increase on a sequential basis, rising to 20.6 percent in August 2015 from 20.4 percent the month before. The volume of queries increased by just one percent in that time-frame.
The US is a huge market for Bing, so not seeing any major improvements from the launch of Windows 10 should come as a surprise, even to Microsoft. The search giant's estimate for "early September" was an increase in the volume of search queries by 10 to 15 percent, and it is too far off that mark.
The reasoning was that, as Windows 10 is installed by more and more users, more and more people would turn to Bing to power their searches, while existing users would rely on Bing even more. And it made sense; that's where the search engine's heavy integration with Windows 10 should have come into play.
In August, the volume of queries, according to comScore, was 3,627 million, while in July this figure came in at 3,596 million. The report is focused on desktops, which is the biggest market for Windows 10. And we are only looking at searches that were purposefully made by users, meaning they had interacted with search engines directly for these market share results.
Microsoft has most likely expected users to adapt to Windows 10 rather than use the new operating system as they have leveraged previous versions. Meaning, the software giant was expecting users to embrace Microsoft Edge, while keeping Bing as the default search provider, use Cortana as their (digital) personal assistant, and make heavy use of Bing-powered apps such as News.
The comScore figures, however, would suggest that users are not as excited, if you will, to use those extras as Microsoft has hoped they would be. If they continue to stick to Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, which, let's face it, are not the obvious choices for Bing fans, Bing's market share gains would be minimal at best -- which they are now. Similarly, if few people power up Cortana or read the news in the default app, Bing does not get any boost from there either. And both seem to be true.
Microsoft has not announced a figure for Windows 10 installs in the US, and is unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future, we do know that the operating system was installed on 75 million devices a week before the end of August, which is not a small figure, and could have only grown further into September.
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