Important points
- Google’s legal dispute with Alphabet has revealed that Microsoft’s attempts to persuade Apple to switch to Bing have failed, highlighting Bing’s unattractiveness for users.
- Microsoft tried to sell Bing to Apple, but Apple declined, citing Bing’s poor search quality and investment.
- Given that Bing was an early home for co-pilots. Questions arise about Bing’s influence on Microsoft’s AI advances.
Although Bing hasn’t gained much traction in the search engine market, one could argue that the service was a good stepping stone for Copilot. As it turns out, Copilot for the Web replaced Bing Chat, and it just snowballed from there. However, recent news has revealed that Microsoft tried to sell Bing to Apple, but the deal was terminated due to the quality of Bing’s search results.
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Source: Microsoft
According to reports CNBC, this news was announced during a legal battle with Google’s holding company, Alphabet. This comes amid a debate over whether Google has a monopoly on web search, with Google insisting it operates fairly. As part of that discussion, Microsoft revealed that he tried to convince Apple to use Bing as its default search engine in 2009, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018, and 2020. Did. But Microsoft got the same result every time.
“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 said in the filing. It’s written on the document.
Additionally, Microsoft offered Apple the opportunity to acquire Bing or enter into a joint venture around Bing during its 2018 attempt. And as you can imagine, Apple wasn’t impressed. Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services.
“Microsoft’s search quality, their investment in search, everything just didn’t matter. And everything got lower. So the search quality itself wasn’t that good. They were at a level where Google or Microsoft could invest. They didn’t have the kind of investments they were making, and their advertising organization and monetization methods weren’t very good either.”
Unfortunately, Google’s attempts to assert its non-exclusive claim are doing collateral damage to Microsoft’s own reputation. However, this is an interesting topic to think about. If Bing became part of Apple’s product line, would Microsoft continue to release Copilot? Was the switch from Bing Chat to Copilot an important catalyst for Microsoft’s continued development, or? Would we have gone full steam ahead even if we lost Bing? Perhaps we’ll never know, but at least Bing touched a lot of people, no matter how much Microsoft encouraged users to move to Bing. There is evidence that it is not.