TL;DR: Info from the Google antitrust trial is flowing once more now that the decide dominated that the Justice Division can resume publicly posting evidentiary paperwork. One of many newest tidbits from the listening to is that Microsoft just lately tried to promote Apple its Bing search engine.
Bloomberg notes that executives from Microsoft tried to minimize a deal with former Apple Companies VP Eddie Cue to purchase Bing in 2020. If the deal had gone by, Cupertino would possible have canceled or refused to resume its long-standing contract to maintain Google the default search engine on its gadgets.
Sadly for Microsoft, the talks fizzled out within the early part, which isn’t any shock. Bing’s market share is way much less enticing than Google’s 90 % slice of the pie. Apple was already accumulating an estimated $19 billion per yr from Alphabet with out the additional problem of sustaining a search engine.
Shopping for Bing did not make good enterprise sense, so the talks by no means moved out of the “exploratory phases.”
Bing has by no means caught any traction since Microsoft unveiled it in 2009, and for good purpose. As one who tried to maneuver to Bing to get away from Google, I used to be unimpressed and unhappy with Bing’s search leads to the early days. It could have improved over time, however first impressions are essentially the most lasting, and the stats show it.
Bing is the second-place search engine worldwide, however the hole between first and second is an ocean. As of August 2023, StatCounter lists Google as holding 91.85 % of the search engine market to Bing’s 3.02 %.
Regardless of Bing’s measly standing, testimony from Microsoft’s chief of promoting and net companies, Mikhail Parakhin, revealed that Apple was ready to make use of Bing to leverage more cash from Alphabet beneath the risk that it could make it the default on greater than 2 billion gadgets, which contains 1.65 billion iPhones.
Whether or not this info helps or hurts the Justice Division’s case is difficult to say. On the one hand, it demonstrates that if an enormous like Microsoft couldn’t compete with Google, how may smaller serps like DuckDuckGo? On the opposite, it illustrates that competitors inside the market does exist to the extent that Apple may use Bing as a bargaining chip. If no selection existed, Alphabet may have instructed Apple to take a hike when it requested for a bigger income share.
