But come 2020, a new round of talks opened between Apple and Microsoft. Bloomberg reports that Microsoft executives met with Apple’s Services VP Eddy Cue to “discuss the possibility of acquiring Bing.” These talks were reportedly “exploratory” and “never reached an advanced stage,” Bloomberg says.
The revenue generated from its deal with Google was a “key reason” Apple’s talks to acquire Bing never advanced beyond that stage. “The company also had concerns about Bing’s ability to compete with Google in quality and capabilities,” today’s report explains.
Apple Bing sounds like something from hell. Imagine being forced to use Bing on every Apple device you own. That has to be one of the circle of hell Dante decided to not tell us about.
I don’t think it would’ve been that bad. It could have made a dent in Google’s market share, because as we all know, normies just stick with the default no matter how bad they are.
j0scher,
Absolutely right. Almost the entire user base will use whatever is preinstalled if there’s no choice screen.
Here in the US we’ve never had browser choice screens, but this article goes into detail showing drastic behavioral differences for consumers in areas that do have them.
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/role-default-settings-online-searches
I’m sure the same is true of web browsers too. Being default==dominance. Normally this means that the platform developers choose which tech to promote, however microsoft windows was an exceptional case as their antitrust lawsuit prohibited them from forcing defaults, which opened up the market for google to pay vendors to have chrome and google.com be the default on many windows PCs, which worked in google’s favor.
I’d prefer choice screens, otherwise it basically turns into a pay to win market where the richest companies win. This incidentally is why alternative browsers like firefox have such critically low market share.
I don’t know… A lot normal people continued to use google maps after Apple introduced apple maps. Many use gmail over mail, chrome over safari. Google services are so much easier to set up and use, and have good name recognition that people would take the minimal effort to change the default if it were provided. I’m always shocked when I hear people use apple’s mail app. Who hurt you? Why are you stuck in 1998 era email solutions? Did eudora light save your life? Would be even happier with Pine?
Bill Shooter of Bul,
I don’t really see this as an exceptional case. Two factors are in play:
1) the ‘good enough’ principal. If the defaults are good enough, the average user will not change them. Arguably when it debuted, apple maps failed to be good enough, it was a notorious product and this could have driven customers to actively seek alternatives.
2) conditioning. Once users are conditioned to use a specific icon for internet, email, calendar, etc, it will become habitual. Creating new platform “default” icons won’t necessarily change the habitual behavior especially if the old (non-default) icons are still there.
It seems to me that defaults are are most effective when users are using new profiles/new devices. This is when users are most impressionable and aren’t yet acting on deeply ingrained habits.
AI or not, If APple purchased Bing, it would’ve been a serious money leech on them, even up til now.
I have serious mixed feelings about Bing. It began to work way better for me than Google since Google choose to kneecap their literal search (words under “” marks), and their advanced features looks more watered down than ever.
But at same time, it belongs to MS, who more often than not, has both a extreme issue with the concept of “bloatware”, feature creeping every single product under their brand towards a mess, and also a propensity to abuse behavior against competition every time they get significant market share in any area. As a Linux user, the least thing that I want is a search engine that returns broken results just because I’m in the “wrong” operating system.
Now I’m on Brave search (given they are my browser of choice), and thinking about Kagi (now they have unlimited search plans).