During September, bloomberg Apple reportedly held preliminary talks with Microsoft about acquiring Bing in 2020. New court filings released this week reveal details of acquisition negotiations between Apple and Microsoft.
According to reports CNBC, these documents were filed as part of a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit alleging that Google has a monopoly in the web search industry. In a document released Friday, Google argued that Microsoft’s relationship with Apple, including acquisition talks, is evidence that Google does have “competition” in the search industry.
According to Google’s filing, Microsoft proposed to Apple at least seven times in 2009, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2020 to make Bing the default search engine in Safari. Each time, Google stated that Apple passed up the opportunity for the following reasons: Search quality.
“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 the competition,” Google explains. did.
Google also wrote in its filing that Microsoft approached Apple in 2018 to promote improvements to Bing’s search quality. Microsoft’s goal was to “sell Bing to Apple or form a Bing-related joint venture.”
The filing includes comments from Eddie Cue, Apple’s head 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.”
Of course, Google and Apple have a lucrative partnership through which Google pays billions of dollars to be the default search engine on Apple’s platforms. Revenue from the deal with Google was the “main reason” Apple’s bid to acquire Bing did not progress beyond the exploration stage, multiple reports have said.
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