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Bloomberg: Apple held talks with Microsoft about acquiring Bing in 2020
- candiddevmike 3y agoSo is Apple building their own search engine?
- outside1234 3y agohoo boy that would have been interesting
- gjsman-1000 3y agoI think Apple would've seen the name Bing and being associated with it as being a net negative for brand reputation.
- dangus 3y agoI don’t think they would have called it Bing. It would get the DarkSky treatment. Apple has far more of a network of users than Bing. They don’t need Bing’s users or brand. “Bing” would be the default search on iOS and macOS and it would instantly have an order of magnitude more users than Bing. I’m not exaggerating. There are over a billion active iPhone users. There are 100 million active Bing users.
- koolba 3y agoI bet they would just call it “Finder”.
- qqtt 3y agoYou aren't comparing apples to apples with those numbers. Bing has 100 million active daily users. Apple has about 2 billion registered "active" devices, which means they were used within a 30 day period. In this case, you are comparing daily active users for a particular service with monthly active users for an entire device. It's not clear if any Apple service reaches a lofty DAU. Apple hasn't released daily active users for any of it's services, but it has argued recently that iMessage has less than 45 million active users in the EU (https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/04/imessage-app-store-gatekeeper-not-big-enough/ https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/04/imessage-app-store-gatekeeper...). Meanwhile, some estimates put Bing's monthly active users over a billion.
- addicted 3y agoIm pretty sure it would be “Search”. And that’s it.
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y agoMaybe they’d rename it Ping. They wouldn’t even have to get new t-shirts made :)
- callalex 3y agoHA! Thanks for that reminder. I belly laughed when they launched that, and I can’t even tell you when it died because it never really took off in the first place.
- voisin 3y agoBeing paid $10b a year by Google to be the default is a good incentive not to buy or build your own search engine unless you’re certain it will be successful.
- addicted 3y agoKneecapping your biggest (only?) competitor in a $500Bn market (and that’s just smartphone hardware) is a good incentive to turn down those measly $10Bn.
- cmcaleer 3y agoAdd in the damage it does to your monopoly defense though and suddenly it's not as obviously +EV.
- dredmorbius 3y agoAccepting payment to not compete ... raises the question of collusion and conspiracy to maintain both monopolies.
- ffgjgf1 3y agoBut it’s not that. It’s like supermarkets charging suppliers to place their products in more appealing/visible shelf positions.
- dredmorbius 3y agoWell, yeah, there are supermarkets involved. But that's hardly all of it. There are to vertically- and horizontally-integrated monpolies, both running their own supermarket chains (app stores), with their own real estate monopoly networks (brand A and i smartphones), each of which grows and processes its own food and consumable products (software apps), as well as the logistical back-ends for distributing and managing that (brand A and i smartphone OSes), in a market in which other independent vendors exist, and Brand G pays brand A (which offers OS and smartphones i, not A) an absolutely gobstopping premium to both not promote third-party products and refrain from developing and promoting its own product, not by buying preferential shelf placement but by buying all shelf-space, by default. Which suddenly looks a lot less copacetic.
- PlunderBunny 3y agoI would be amazed if Apple didn't have a search engine developed in-house that was 'all ready to go'. Not to say that I think they will deploy it, but they would be silly not to be ready.
- jmbwell 3y agoSiri and “results from the web” already use an Apple internal search engine. It is crawled by AppleBot and integrated with the OS. There’s just no web form front end.
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y agoI would amazed if it was any good. There are things Apple are good at and there are things they aren’t. Web services? Intelligent data processing? I can’t say they’ve got great track records in either area.
- PlunderBunny 3y agoYeah, but it didn't stop them with Apple Maps.
- anon373839 3y agoOn the other hand, Apple is good at acquiring competence. I think their incredible execution with the A- and M-line chips shows that.
- epberry 3y agoIf I'm reading this right Apple chose Google 3 times over Bing.
- choppaface 3y agoAnd Apple also happened to choose Google for iCloud storage over Azure or even "build their own" https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/06/29/apple-is-now-googles-largest-corporate-customer-for-cloud-storage https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/06/29/apple-is-now-goog...
- dredmorbius 3y agoAlso covered by The Verge (from a subsequent HN submission): <https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/28/23895055/microsoft-apple-bing-sale-rumor-google-default https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/28/23895055/microsoft-apple-...>
- paint 3y ago[dead]
- innagadadavida 3y agoAround 2016 when Apple released Messages with extensions, the gifs search feature called #images used Bing to crawl gifs, the biggest reason being it was safe and filtered by AI. That turned out so horrible that Apple ditched Bing in #images. This probably cemented Google’s spot.