I stumbled onto a CNN article about Bing a couple minutes ago. I have to admit, the lede was pretty eye-catching: "Bing, Microsoft's two-year old search engine, is losing nearly $1 billion a quarter, with no sign of letting up."

CNNMoneyTech reporter David Goldman then broke out the calculator to estimate that Bing's lost $5.5 billion since the search engine went active in the summer of 2009. He also claims that Bing, for all its incremental gains over that period, is siphoning the majority of its market share from Yahoo and "search cellar-dwellers" as opposed to big bad Google.

That data isn't necessarily fresh news, at least to people who've been following Microsoft for some time. Every quarter, Microsoft offers up the revenue numbers for its online services division, and every quarter it's pretty much a massacre. However, online services are vital to Microsoft's "all in" cloud strategy. Bing is deeply baked into products like Windows Phone, and the search engine's flood of user data helps Microsoft adjust and refine its other services.

In recent months, Microsoft has made very public its intentions to use Facebook and other partnerships to boost Bing's online presence. In the case of Facebook, that means integrating objects such as the "Like" button into the Bing interface.

"We don't have to beat anybody to take share," Bing director Stefan Weitz told me in May, adding that, by offering more granular search in verticals like travel, paired with these new social features, Bing could more than hold its own against Google and its dominance of traditional keyword search.

So Microsoft's more than willing to keep burning money on this endeavor. It's not about profitability so much as growing a cloud ecosystem. The bigger question is when Microsoft will begin to see substantial revenues from that "all in" cloud strategy.

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