Comscore's latest data: Bing's U.S. share grows and Windows Mobile's drops

The February comScore data is in, and Microsoft's share is up slightly again, while Yahoo's share continued to decline.

Microsoft's Bing is now the source of 11.5 percent of all U.S. searches, up from 11.3 percent in January, according to comScore. Yahoo is down to 16.8 percent, from 17 percent in January. Google is still the dominant No. 1, with 65.5 percent of U.S. searches for February, up from 65.4 percent the prior month.

Microsoft and Yahoo received antitrust clearance for their proposed partnership in February. Via that 10-year deal, Microsoft is going to be powering with Bing the Yahoo Web search results. I'm interested to see what happens to the Bing share numbers once that transition is accomplished; will the combined Microsoft-Yahoo share stay stagnant, decline or remain the same, compared with Google's share?

In addition to releasing monthly search-share results, comScore also announced its latest U.S. mobile-phone subscriber-marketshare numbers. Windows Mobile's share of the market continued to slide, yet the Microsoft smartphone OS (on all Windows Mobile phones from multiple vendors combined). Yet Microsoft still remained the No. 3 player, subscriber-wise, behind RIM and Apple for the three-month period between October 2009 and January 2010.

Microsoft was the biggest loser, share-wise, during that three-month period, dropping to 15.7 percent share, according to comScore. The biggest gainer was No. 4, Google, whose share rose to 7.1 percent, according to the comScore data released on March 10.

Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 partners aren't expected to begin shipping phones with Microsoft's new mobile OS until the fourth quarter of 2010. Microsoft officials have said that applications written for Windows 6.x phones won't run on Windows Phone 7 devices. It would seem Microsoft's share of the smartphone OS market is going to continue to take a nosedive for the next couple of quarters, at least, given those factors....