Back in September 2023, a Bloomberg report claimed, through anonymous sources, that Microsoft once approached Apple with a proposal to sell its Bing search division to a Cupertino resident in 2020. Now, newly unsealed court documents appear to confirm part of that story. .
CNBC reports that court documents revealed late Friday show Google’s claim that Microsoft offered to sell Bing to Apple in 2018. Microsoft is also said to have proposed a second plan in which it and Apple would form a joint venture with Bing.
Court documents included a quote from Eddie Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services at the time. He said he was unimpressed with Bing’s search quality and his Microsoft’s own investment in the division. In the filing, Cue said:
They weren’t investing at the level that Google or Microsoft could. Also, the advertising organization and monetization methods were not very good.
Court filings also show that Apple CEO Tim Cook emailed his company’s executives about their opinions on Bing, but Cook’s specific comments were redacted in the filing. ing.
The new filing was made public as part of an antitrust lawsuit filed by Google with the U.S. Department of Justice. The Justice Department claims that Google has a monopoly in the online search industry. Google’s court filing is an attempt by the company to demonstrate that it has a monopoly in the online search industry. It’s certainly a competition with Bing.
The document from Google states that Microsoft has tried numerous times over the years to get Apple to replace Google Seach as the default search engine in Apple’s Safari web browser. Apple reportedly rejected all of these offers from Microsoft. Bing was used by Apple. From 2013 to 2017, it was used as the search engine for the Siri digital assistant. However, Apple later decided to switch Siri’s default to Google Search.
