That’s because it doesn’t make sense, at least if we’re talking about quality. If Google and nobody else had paid Apple a penny to be the default, Apple would s

That’s because it doesn’t make sense, at least if we’re talking about quality. If Google and nobody else had paid Apple a penny to be the default, Apple would still probably have Google as the default because it is still the best of the free options today. Of course the iPhone is so popular that it doesn’t make any sense for somebody to not pay Apple to be the default, and that is a lot of potential traffic that Google would lose out on if they took no action and remained complacent. And if quality matters to the discussion (which might be a bigger “if” than I’m giving credit for here) Google today is worse than Google in 2009. Bing’s problem isn’t that it isn’t as good as Google today, it’s that they never even matched Google in 2009 and the decay in quality at Google hasn’t made it worse than Bing currently is.