You probably wish you had bought it now.
Microsoft offered to sell its search engine Bing to Apple in 2018, Google claimed in court documents this month.
The information is part of court documents that have surfaced in a legal battle over whether Alphabet has a monopoly on web search advertising, with Google trying to ensure its search engine is unique with Apple and Google. The case concerned an important deal with an Android phone manufacturer.
Google paid Apple more than £19bn in protection fees in 2021 to keep its search engine the default, according to slides shown during the trial in October. Google has tried to show that it is acting fairly.
In this month’s paper, Google notes that Microsoft lobbied Apple to make Bing the default for Apple’s Safari web browser in 2009, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018, and 2020, but each time Apple said Bing was a no-brainer and said no. .
“In each case, Apple seriously considered the quality of Bing and Google and determined that Google was the better default choice for Safari users. That’s competition,” Google said in the paper.
In its own new documents, the Department of Justice said Microsoft spent around £73bn on Bing over 20 years. The Windows and Office software maker launched Bing in 2009 after trying searches under the names MSN and Windows Live.
According to StatCounter, Bing currently has a 3% global market share. In the fourth quarter, Microsoft earned £2.3 billion from search and news advertising, compared to Google’s search and other revenue of £35 billion.
Google said in a paper that when Microsoft talked with Apple about improving Bing in 2018, Microsoft suggested either selling Bing to Apple or starting a Bing-related joint venture with Apple. said.
Eddie Cue, Apple’s head of services, said that Microsoft’s search quality, investment in search, everything was not good at all. Microsoft was investing at every level that Google or Microsoft could invest. Also, the ad group and use of funds were not very good. ”
Google said Apple President Tim Cook sent an email to Apple executives about the Bing review, but his comments were censored in court documents.
In October, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in court that “every year during my time as president, we tested whether Apple would accept” a default contract with Bing.
“If Apple hadn’t received the huge payments it wanted from Google, Apple would have built its own search engine,” the Justice Department said in the paper.
Bloomberg reported in September, citing unnamed people, that around 2020 Microsoft executives had “chatted” with Apple’s head of services, Eddie Cue, about selling Bing to Apple. .
If Apple had bought Bing and used it to build its own search engine, history would have been different. Bing wasn’t that important in 2020, but it provided Vole with the foundation on which he built his AI empire. Without Bing, Microsoft would be in the same position as Apple, with no plans or capabilities for AI. Apple is now in a position to play catch-up, but if court documents are to be believed, it has been cashing huge checks from Google for years to make up for it.
