Shrinking margins don't seem like a problem yet. Operating margin went up YoY from 25% -> 26% and revenue was up 20%. For the record, here's the discussion we had last year about search advertising margin: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10796448. Odds for your prediction of widespread Google layoffs in 2016 are looking worse by the day.

And market share loss to Bing? Don't make me laugh. Bing revenues are up 9% YoY (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2017-Q1...) while Google website income is up 23% YoY (note we don't have breakdown into search but conference call says this was primarily generated by mobile search & YouTube).

I agree widespread layoffs are probably not in the cards unless the next quarter really tanks. I don't count cutting back projects like Google Fiber as "widespread".

Bing's growth and CPC improvement in the Americas comes at the cost of the only other search engine.

I wouldn't get too excited about the 20% revenue growth, it didn't quite match the 21% total growth of the segment[1].

[1] https://www.iab.com/news/first-quarter-u-s-internet-ad-reven...

Those numbers are rather suspicious when Microsoft is not getting meaningful revenue from bing.

Do you have any evidence that Google is losing market share? The latest reports I could find (from Feb 2016) showed that Bing's incredibly small increase in market share in the Americas is actually less than Google's growth, and at the expense of Yahoo and Ask.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/bings-share-search-marke... sees it a bit differently.

0.2% change in one month does not make a trend.

Desktop market share is also increasingly less relevant to the search engine game.

> market share loss to Bing

wut?

And by the time that happens, they have become proper revenue-generating businesses rather than "bets".