>Spending huge sums of money. Or receiving huge sums of money. Which would you prefer? No, that's not the way too look at it. Apple spending billions to buy t

>Spending huge sums of money. Or receiving huge sums of money. Which would you prefer? No, that's not the way too look at it. Apple spending billions to buy the Bing search engine would then let Apple collect 100% of the search ads revenue instead of splitting someone else's ad revenue with a middleman (aka Google). So the business decision matrix is based on whether 100% of ad revenue minus the acquisition & ongoing maintenance costs of Bing -- would be worth more than X% of Google's revenue split. Acquiring the "Bing search engine" isn't just the index ranking algorithm. It also includes getting the whole back-office infrastructure of ads-monetization management & dashboards for advertisers to log in to bid+buy ads.