Microsoft reportedly tried to sell Bing to Apple in 2018, but failed.
The sale fell through because Apple had concerns about Bing’s search quality, ad units, and ability to monetize, according to documents in Google’s antitrust lawsuit with the U.S. Department of Justice.
According to CNN, Google argues that the failed sale highlights that Bing lost because it was an inferior search engine, not because Google made the search market unfair to its competitors. are doing.
Apple turns down Microsoft. Microsoft is said to have proposed selling Bing to Apple or forming a joint venture with Bing. Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, explained why Apple said “no” to Microsoft in its filing:
- “Microsoft’s search quality, its investment in search, everything just didn’t matter. And everything went down low. So the search quality itself wasn’t that good.”
- “They weren’t investing at the level that Google or Microsoft were able to invest, and their advertising organization and monetization methods weren’t very good either.”
What Google is saying. Google claims that Microsoft’s failed attempt to sell Bing to Apple shows that Bing is an inferior search engine. Google wrote in its filing:
- “In each case, Apple thoroughly considered the relative quality of Bing and Google and concluded that Google was the superior default choice for Safari users. That’s competition.”
Google also said that Microsoft approached Apple multiple times in 2009, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018, and 2020 to propose making Bing the default search engine for Apple’s Safari web browser. It is also claimed that However, Apple consistently rejected this idea, citing concerns about the quality of his Bing’s performance.
What Microsoft says. Microsoft has denied that its attempt to sell Bing to Apple was due to quality issues, but instead the tech giant claims that the sale was blocked by Google. Mikhail Parakhin, CEO of Microsoft’s advertising and web services division, has proposed giving more than 100% of the revenue or gross profit to Apple to make Bing the default search engine, but Apple and Google’s agreement This proposal was rejected for this reason.
In the federal antitrust case, Mr. Palaquin argued that this was despite Microsoft offering to pay Apple more than Google, which it claimed was a payout of about 60%. He said:
- “We were big enough to play, but probably not big enough to win, if that makes sense.”
What the Department of Justice says. Google has a financial agreement with Apple to become the default search engine for Apple’s products at a cost of about $10 billion a year. Additionally, Google pays Apple advertising revenue, which is one of the biggest costs for the search engine. In its filing, the Justice Department claimed that Apple’s Mr. Cue testified as follows:
- “If Apple had not received the large payments it sought from Google, Apple would have developed its own search engine,” the Justice Department argued in its filing.
Google could pay up to $19 billion for Apple That will happen this fiscal year, according to estimates from Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi. The Justice Department argues that these large sums of money are the reason Apple turned down a potential joint venture with Microsoft, not because Bing is inferior to Google.
why do you care. The US Department of Justice has accused Google of using unfair tactics to maintain its position as the world’s top search engine. The lawsuit could be successful if Google can prove its search engine superiority. But if it loses, Google could lose its automatic position as the default search engine for popular Apple products, creating a potential threat to Google’s dominance in the search market.
market share statistics. The US Department of Justice claims that Google owns his 90% share of the search market. Meanwhile, Bing’s global market share is 3%, according to StatCounter.
Get the daily newsletter search that marketers rely on.
deep dive. Read the latest information on the Google Antitrust Examination for everything you need to know.
