The Verge has an excellent write-up of Satya Nadella’s day in court during the Google antitrust trial today.
The power of defaults is one of the central questions of the entire US v. Google case and will continue to come up. (The witness after Nadella is former Neeva CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, who has also said his search engine was crushed in part because overcoming Google’s default status was so difficult.) Nadella is in the rare position to have seen both sides — what it’s like to be the default and what it’s like to contend when you’re not — and argued resolutely that defaults are the only thing that truly matters. Google, on the other hand, says that building the best product is the only thing that truly matters and that Bing has never come close to doing that. Which side of that debate Judge Mehta agrees with may be the story of this entire trial.
It’s an excellent and at times even funny read.
Microsoft is no less evil than Google but in this case I hope they win. Google’s search marketshare needs to come down to a healthier 60% or so.
I don’t see much difference if there are only 2 engines. We need at least 3, better 4.
I really enjoyed the read and it was Nadella being honest about what default means and the power it grants.
We’ve been watching him say in both this case and that Bing isnt the leader, and we heard the same about the Xbox in another competition case.
You could imagine Balmer showboating and almost delusionaly claiming both were superior.
But Nadella has led a different Microsoft that behaves very differently. He is shedding that old MS rep (at least in my opinion) of being the anti-competitive market leader, instead returning to the early days of a company fighting for its place against the engrained monopoly.
Who knew that it would be Google that would shift to only consider its consumers to be exploitable chattle.
There was a day when we would have assumed one was talking about Microsoft.