I think the point is that Bing is competition, but they are not as good as Google's product.
So i.e. it is not simply the fact that Google is #1 "just because" and they are sitting there milking an inferior product and forcing it on everyone through backroom deals to keep the monopoly, but they are top because they have a better product and keep winning competitive bids as a result.
I think the fact that these failed pitches even happened (and happened multiple times in the past decade or so) shows that there is quite strong competition. It's not like this was just some unheard of startup sending emails to apple and not getting a response, it sounds like proper high-level stuff between two behemoths of tech (apple and microsoft), so it was a serious thing from the sounds of it.
Personally I use duckduckgo which I think uses Bing, and I am comfortable with it, but there you go.
I don't know how it helps their case to show that their main competitor is weak and underinvested, wouldn't it be way better for them if they could portray Bing as formidable competition?
Wouldn’t index to much on Apple just meeting with Bing as a sign of Bing being a realistic solution. If I was apple I would off course try to create the sense Bing is viable alternative to extract as much value from Google in negotiations
Google does not have a better product. They used to, but not anymore. I usually use google but only out of habit and because it was the default. A lot of times I have trouble and end up on duckduckgo, which uses Bing. Now with GPT integration Bing is really useful.
Apple gets paid tens of billions of dollars per year by Google, which is over a third of the revenue Google brings in from Safari. They have an absolutely gigantic financial incentive to keep using Google. Even if they were to acquire Bing for free, they would still have to get its profits to over a third of Google’s Safari-attributed revenue just to break even on the switch.
If Apple were to acquire Bing, it would be about gaining control at a financial cost. Bing being as good as Google as a search engine doesn’t really come into it.
Apple probably agreed that acquiring Bing was worthwhile, as the discussions did happen, but they haven’t agreed that it was worth more than the amount Google pays to them to stay the default search engine.
If I had all the money in the world, I'd also buy the very same car seven times in a row, if it's simply the best car for me. That doesn't mean the car market is not competitive.
I'm not arguing that the search engine market is competitive, it is probably not, but deriving that conclusion from the fact that Apple did not choose Bing in favor of Google is... weak, in my opinion.
Apple have all the money to do anything that they want to do, as does Google, Amazon, etc.
But..
1. Not everything is within a company's culture to achieve, no matter how much money is thrown at it.
2. If you _really_ wanted to do something with urgency, then of course you'd consider acquiring people, tech, teams, and IP to accelerate that thing, but point #1 says you still might not succeed (and the ruins of so much M&A across the whole industry says you really need to consider that first point hard).
I don’t think this is about how technically complex that would be. That’s clearly not where the moat is.
The moat is in the commercial operations powering the cash machine that Google has built across its numerous properties.
You can build this engine but it won’t give you the richness of the data Google collects through Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Analytics etc… on its users.
You could argue that Apple could try, through its own properties, but it would go against the privacy stance (essential to their image now).
Not saying they aren’t capable of dancing around this problem either, but then you start eroding your brand (which sells lots of iPhones).
That’s when you start seeing that it’s just simpler to externalize this cost to a third party that you can then openly criticize and use as scarecrow to reinforce your market position, all the while collecting tens of billions in profits from them.
Yes profits, they don’t pay anything to operate Google Search. Given that Google gives them a third of revenue on Safari, that means Apple would need a product that does multiple times what they get for it today. That also requires a sales force they don’t fully have (although that’s been increasing for their own properties like AppStore and News).
Anyway, looking at it from this angle, it’s kind of genius not to change the status quo.
It is amazing that nobody can compete with google at search. Are the search engines in China and Russia as good respectively? I mean are they their countries version of Google search?
Apple negging Microsoft for not investing more in Bing and "monetizing" better (i.e. vacuuming more data), but from a business perspective, that means you should want to buy it _more_. And how does Google know?
I wouldn't be surprised if Kagi has already received multiple offers from various companies. The person behind Kagi seems very driven and has a vision for it that doesn't include taking a boat load of cash at this time. See the way they did their first investment round, it was not pitched to VCs.
>The filing includes comments from Eddy Cue, Apple’s services boss:
>Microsoft search quality, their investment in search, everything was not significant at all.
Does this mean Microsoft doesn't spend a lot of money on improving Bing? That would be weird because they embedded Bing on Windows 11, and then embedded AI into Bing. I guess things changed since 2018?
I don't think either of those counts as an improvement. MS has a long history of integrating their otherwise not-so-competitive products into their OSes just to get people to use them. And wrt AI, well, things have definitely changed since 2018!
In 1999 Larry Page and Sergey Brin tried to sell Google: "...They went to Excite CEO George Bell and offered to sell it to him for $1 million. He rejected the offer. Vinod Khosla, one of Excite's venture capitalists, talked the duo down to $750,000, but Bell still rejected it..." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google
