Here's why the company finally decided to essentially pull the plug on display advertising this week. It has slowly been shuttering ad products, while placing an increased focus on search. Microsoft's exit from the display ad business has been a long time coming. Senior staff including the company's corporate vice president of advertising and consumer monetization Rik van der Kooi and corporate vice president of advertising and online Frank Holland will likely remain to steer through the transition and to accelerate its ad sales focus over to Bing. The blog post appears to signal that not everybody is leaving Microsoft Advertising just yet.As part of the deal, Microsoft's Bing will replace Google Search across AOL's sites.Adtech company AppNexus will expand its role in selling ads programmatically for Microsoft to 39 markets worldwide.Up to 1,200 Microsoft Advertising employees will be shifting over to AOL, which will absorb the direct sales of ads across Microsoft's content sites including MSN in its nine biggest markets, which includes the US and the UK.To summarize, here's what's going on, according to a blog post from Microsoft:

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