4 ms·
Microsoft executive says Google deals kept Bing small
- ozfive 3y agoRiiight...
- astrodust 3y ago"Doing exclusive deals to lock out competitors is our move!"
- esafak 3y agoGavin Belson: "I don't know about you people, but I don't want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do."
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoSilicon Valley was an underrated show full of such jems.
- umeshunni 3y agounderrated? It's widely considered one of the best recent HBO shows.
- lukas099 3y agoMaybe they know that and they believe it should be even higher rated than it is :)
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoIt's underrated in the sane that most people never herd of it and the people I talked to said they couldn't watch it as it was too boring for them. It really only appealed to a very niche audience who understood the intricacies of the SV tech world, it was in no way mainstream the way shows like Friends or The Office.
- matthewfelgate 3y agoBring it back.
- coding123 3y agoprecursor to FTC stuff
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- paul7986 3y agoThen these exclusivity deals should not be allowed! In terms of making users choose an engine on their new phone ... a good UX to achieve this is by forcing them to choose once they do their first search whether via an AI assistant, web browser or etc... just show a bunch icons for a bunch of search engines to choose from. They are listed alphabetically.
- eric_the_read 3y agoBe right back, I'm starting a new search engine, AAAAA A Best Searches
- salawat 3y agoIt doesn't work in libraries, it won't work here.
- donmcronald 3y ago> accuses Google of paying $10 billion annually to wireless carriers and smartphone makers to ensure that Google search is the default on their devices > Bing was not the default installed in any Android or Apple smartphone sold in the U.S. in the past decade, even though Microsoft would at times offer to give more than 100% of revenue -- or more -- to its partner So they're mad that Google paid a bunch of money to keep them from being the default because they wanted to pay a bunch of money to keep everyone else from being the default, but Google had more money than them? Cry me a river. Lol. I switched to Edge and Bing when Edge started using Chromium. I used it for over a year, maybe two and had to switch away because Microsoft couldn't stop jamming stuff in my face and adding useless features. Microsoft needs to reflect on how they're treating users instead of trying to find a scapegoat for their failures. They're not some little startup getting disenfranchised by an anti-competitive bully. They are an anti-competitive bully that failed to compete against someone on equal footing.
- doesnt_know 3y ago> "We were just big enough to play but not big enough to win," Tinter said. I don't think you're supposed to say this bit out loud are you? Microsoft are just upset that they aren't the ones with the monopoly.
- adrr 3y agoWhich is a good thing. If it was bing, i would get a call from my parents every time they switched phones on how to change search to google.
- pjmlp 3y agoWell in a way it isn't that much different from OEM deals that kept other OSes out of the PC game, even if OEMs were willing to take part.
- netdur 3y agoSorry Microsoft, you had a small window to win on search with ChatGPT, but instead, you opted to immediately use this opportunity to force users to install software they don't care about. You are small because of you, not because of Google.
- hospitalJail 3y agoYep I was born into windows/M$ life and they were so bad I had to escape. Its really nice to not think about M$ anymore... maybe when my kid plays minecraft.
- nonethewiser 3y agoBut thats a completely unrelated decision. That came how long after the incident in question? 10 years?
- emodendroket 3y agoThere is a lot of inertia to defaults but ultimately if your product is way worse people are going to seek out the better one they’re already familiar with.
- TradingPlaces 3y agoWhy don’t they outbid Google if that’s all that’s holding back Bing? They have the money.
- xethos 3y agoI mean, if push came to shove... do they?
- TradingPlaces 3y agoAbout $60b in free cash flow in the last 4 quarters. Govt says Google pays Apple $4b-$7b a year. Yes they do.
- xethos 3y agoThat 4-7 billion is the price Apple and Google negotiated. It doesn't say much about where a bidding war between Google and Microsoft would end up
- eitland 3y agoI have tried out Bing some times earlier and I think I can confirm that until the last few years another reason why Google won was because they were better. The last few years I feel Google has become so hilariously bad at search that I didn't care and just used DDH since it promised less tracking. But still DDG and Bing weren't better IMO Google had just sunk to a level so close above them that I didn't think I missed out on anything.
- adventured 3y agoGoogle did win because they were better. Now they're trying to maintain market share through other means to keep as much risk of competition at bay as possible. That's where the anti-trust issues come into play, not on the question of whether Google is better. Ie Google leveraging their acquired scale, market power, to keep competition out to the extent possible (and obviously they could overreach to a greater extent, they could try to damage the competition even more dramatically, but that'd just make the case that much easier). You don't get to be the best and simultaneously use your market power to deny competition access to the market, generally. Intel vs AMD is a classic case of this in action. Intel in theory could have trivially owned the entire market, including eating Nvidia when they were far smaller. Intel had a huge size advantage over most every other semiconductor entity, for years (during the peak of their market position). They weren't allowed to do it, fortunately, due to anti-trust restrictions (either direct or perceived).
- next_xibalba 3y agoAgreed. I have also started using Yandex, which I’ve now come to think has the best UX and search result quality, beyond both Google, which is totally nerfed, and Bing.
- hayst4ck 3y ago> The Yandex Cloud platform is hosted at three Yandex data centers located in the Vladimir, Ryazan, and Moscow regions. Do you really feel good about using a service located in a country that is actively attempting to carry out a genocide against another country?
- water9 3y agoBing’s name kept bing small… that’s the best you could come up with!?
- voisin 3y agoGoogle sounded pretty stupid in the early 2000s until it became commonplace. iPad sounded like a gynaecological product. Facebook sounded weird in the beginning too.
- crazygringo 3y agoI'll agree that names like Google, Yahoo, and iPad eventually came to sound normal. But for whatever reason, Bing has always sounded idiotic to me. Still sounds idiotic going on 14 years. Was the same with Zune -- just never got used to it. I don't think we get used to everything. Some names are just bad within a given cultural context, and repeated exposure doesn't make them any less bad.
- nico 3y agoIt would be nice if the main interface for all search engines were an API Then browsers/apps/phones could just search on whatever engines they prefer (or several at the same time) then just display results to the user It actually sucks that we are forced to use the whole interface of the search engines
- wodenokoto 3y agoI think the dynamics of Google paid default search engine is super interesting. Everyone who takes the money agree that they wouldn't want to use another search engine. At the same time, Apple and Google are fierce competitors and deeply in bed with each other. "We don't want to help your business by giving you access to customers, but we would like you to pay a lot of money to get access to our customer base, which we would have done anyway"
- voisin 3y ago> which we would have done anyway Not necessarily. Had they not paid, Apple may have chosen to create its own search engine for safari on iOS devices. Part of this fee from Google was certainly a “don’t compete with us on this metric because we are raising the bar by $10b/year for you to bother competing”
- lukas099 3y agoApple and Google compete for fractions of market share, but neither is really scared of the other. If it came to it, Apple and Google would gladly band together to push down any newcomers in the market. In the meantime they are happy to trade with each other where it makes sense for both parties.
- matthewfelgate 3y agoSame with Microsoft and Apple dominating the computer OS market.
- ReptileMan 3y agoBing returning shitty results is what kept bing small. It has its uses though. Some stuff that is censored on Google is still findable on Bing.
- pjmlp 3y agoGoogle returns better results from MSDN content (now learn) than Bing, which is quite a failure when Microsoft can't properly index their own content.
- amf12 3y agoBing is the default on all Windows devices and Edge, and yet they are complaining about not getting default on Android and Apple devices? > and that this smaller scale translated into poorer quality search. Isn't the scale offered by Windows/Edge not enough? Other search engines like DDG, Kagi are improving their quality even with their even smaller scale. > Tinter testified that Bing was not the default installed in any Android or Apple smartphone sold in the U.S. in the past decade, even though Microsoft would at times offer to give more than 100% of revenue -- or more -- to its partner. If nobody is willing to take on your offer, it may be that your quality is not good enough?
- bad_user 3y agoDuckDuckGo uses Bing under the hood, as they don't have their own index. AFAIK Kagi uses Bing under the hood too. If people use them, it's basically due to UI and privacy theater.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- SushiHippie 3y agoKagi doesn't use bing anymore because microsoft wanted more money, and kagi also has it's own index (teclis) and smallweb. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
- amriksohata 3y agoimagine this argument being made to netscape by microsoft in the past? anti competitive rules apply to everyone
- Keyframe 3y agoMicrosoft executive says... ...the darndest things. I'd bite if it was anyone else.
- jiveturkey 3y agoyeah … it was the deals … not bing, nope
- dimask 3y agoMicrosoft produces the most popular desktop OS, and ensures their browser (and search engine within) is the default there. They integrate it with their OS through Cortana. Still they lose the desktop market. The argument about google keeping them small through deals makes no sense. In the desktop market they have had a massive advantage since times immemorial. If bing was so good they would at least dominate the desktop market pretty easily, even if they lose in the mobile one.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hayst4ck 3y agoI tried Bing the other day because I was curious if Apple was snubbing them legitimately (because bing isn't great and therefore would create a worse experience for Apple users) or illegitimately (because google offered more money). It's clear to me Microsoft still doesn't understand customers. They are still making all the same mistakes that msn.com made. It is just too busy. Microsoft does not understand UI. Google won not just because of comparatively quality search results, but because of minimalism. I don't need to see a picture of the day. I don't need an attention grabbing onboarding/news/suggestion box. I don't need a full menu bar. Google is very good about only polluting the search results with extra information when it is confident that that information is relevant to the search. No boxes pop out when you're scrolling down the page on google. On google, most things that are not the results are pastel, grey, and mildly faded. On bing, everything is thick lines, vivid colors, picture based content. After doing a google search I know exactly where to look. After doing a bing search there are 6 different UI elements all doing battle for my attention. I had to scroll almost 2 full pages to get to the first result that looks like what I expect when I use search on the internet. Bing is obnoxious, and it's asking me to cognitively process 100 different things other than the only thing I care about: my search results. More is less. Microsoft also has a long history of poor security, being in bed with the government, and being a hyper-corporate business-first company. Given that Microsoft is currently loading their operating system with Ads and the history of being in bed with the government (skype), how can anyone trust the Microsoft brand? Low trust brand + bad UI + par level results = "small" service. Nobody is actively changing their default away from google unless they think it's to a more privacy respecting search engine.
- habith 3y ago> Bing is obnoxious, and it's asking me to cognitively process 100 different things other than the only thing I care about: my search results. Google (privacy issues aside) is terrible in that regard as well. I just compared Bing, Google and DDG (https://duck.com https://duck.com) for a random query "c++ headers". On my current resolution and scale (1980x1080, 125%) I can only see 1 result on Bing and Google before having to scroll. The rest of the screen is filled with inline answers and other irrelevant content designed to keep you on their site. DDG on the other hand reminds me of the very old Google days, 4 results, no busy layout and when there are ads they're unobtrusive and clearly labeled. All my devices and browsers are actively not using Google. The only Alphabet property I begrudgingly use for personal reasons nowadays is YouTube and the UI/UX there makes me run to TikTok after short sessions. Honestly, between ChatGPT, site specific searches I rarely need to use a search engine to begin with, and when I do it's DDG for its layout and quality results.
- jrockway 3y agoThey offered a more than 100% revenue share? How exactly is that not anticompetitive?
- foogazi 3y ago> Tinter said that Bing has struggled to win default status on smartphones sold in the United States and that this smaller scale translated into poorer quality search. What’s the default browser on Windows? What’s the default search engine on Edge ?
- reilly3000 3y agoIt’s just so weird how they are struggling. I mean how can they lose when they give away free points for just searching? Free points! Amazing that Google never thought of that one.
- matthewfelgate 3y agoMicrosoft has some cheek accusing others of abusing market dominance!