VIDEO: Microsoft's Carolyn Everson is committed to getting mobile right

"Bing is a priority for the company,” said Everson at the start of the interview with Campaign. “Our focus has been very US centric for the initial roll-out but we are moving very aggressively into other markets in Europe and Asia. It is a key imperative for us.”

Taking an analogy of a wheel, Everson stated that Bing is the centre-spoke of that wheel, and what Microsoft does with Bing will be directly relevant to MSN’s content. “At the moment there are two separate entities, but what we envision doing is looking at user behaviour through Bing as a search engine and populating MSN with that content. We are trying to bridge the gap between the two of them,” she said.

According to Everson, there is an untapped need for consumers to reach a decision faster.

“If you will use Bing for your travel purposes, instead of stating text links and paid listing, Bing won’t just give you information about a travel destination, instead it will give information on travel fares, hotel options, tourist attractions, restaurants etc based on your location. So what we are doing is trying to think through the user’s online behaviour instead of just organising the information, actually help make a decision.”

Microsoft’s new mobile device Mobile 7 is also aimed at giving its users a more local results based on the location. “India, China and Indonesia are three of our strong markets but we have instated a person here to understand the market. It is very nascent for us. And part of that is because we haven’t had the right product to be loud and proud.”

Everson was also candid about Microsoft being so late in the day to start its initiatives and taking a few recourses that have cost it dearly. “We have been sleeping for all this while and Apple and Google has woken us up. We have had a very successful business on enterprise and software side but I think we took a few mis-steps on the mobile side."

Explaining the pending partnership with Yahoo, Everson said, “As a part of our Yahoo/Bing search alliance, there is a certain threshold where Yahoo will be covering and selling search on Bing to premium advertisers and our team will be covering SME."

“Say for instance, J&J wants to buy search on Bing, depending on the value of their investment, Yahoo will complete the transaction, however it is Bing which will explain how the product is working,” she explains.

And finally, asked what Microsoft’s aims are Everson said, “It would be wonderful to be number one.”