Apple in talks with Microsoft to make Bing default search engine on the iPhone | Hacker News Reader

Apple in talks with Microsoft to make Bing default search engine on the iPhone

networkworld.com

14 pointsanderzole30 comments

When I saw the Bing search results, and saw how much of a knockoff it was of Google's design, all I could think about was Arial being a poor knockoff of Helvetica, but at exactly the same widths, because Microsoft didn't want to pay licensing fees to Adobe.

Apple, back in the day, chose Helvetica.

They (Microsoft) didn't want to pay licensing fees to Linotype.

Nah, not even so evil. Plain old ignorance is enough. Microsoft just didn’t care a bit about typography. They were very much content with a knock off because they didn’t know any better.

(Today Microsoft cares quite a bit more about typography so everything’s not the same. They still use the wrong – straight – quotation marks, though. Annoys me without end.)

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple starts more collaborations with Microsoft. Remember how IBM was Apple's big enemy and then they got into bed with each other?

Hopefully they will make "default" search engine configureable.

Settings app → Safari → Search Engine

Though surprisingly, there's only Google and Yahoo! and no way to add custom ones.

Sure surprising. Surprising that you can change search engines at all :)

Safari on Mac OS X doesn’t allow for easy changes. (The iPhone uses Yahoo! for example for the Weather app – that’s not the case on the Mac, so this might be the reason.)

Reasons I'd get rid of my iPhone and get a Google thingy:

  * They put flash on it.
  * They put *anything* from microsoft on it.

Guess the time may be coming to try Android.

Yeah, that would definitely take the bloom off the rose for me as well.

I'm already wishing I had some of the things Android has and Apple doesn't (interpreters FTW) but I would jump if they tried to steer me towards 'favored partners' for search.

But they already have 'favored partners' for search (Goog and Yhoo) you can't add another search provider even if you want to.

They already steer you towards google.

Yep. I don't understand why people assume Google is some sort of neutral party with no corporate interest in vending their search engine + ad sales in the marketplace.

I don't think that is a concern for most people.

The major concern is 'does it work'. Google has far better results, especially for the long tail, than bing at the moment. It's also what most people 'know'.

While the claim that google has better results is rather questionable, the suggestion that bing is too complicated for people to use is just silly. For the purposes of most users the two are readily interchangeable.

You are correct that the major concern is "does it work", but are incorrect in assuming that bing does not meet this rather low bar.

By which measure is Bing inferior to Google? Other than what you 'know'.

"They put anything from microsoft on it."

Dude, books and covers! Please judge products on merit not by who made the damn thing. You can rest assured apple will never let the "average user" experience suffer just to do a deal with another company.

Show me a product from Microsoft that isn't terrible, and perhaps I'll start to forgive them. They have a fantastic track record of making terrible user experience products.

What office suite do you use?

As a user who uses ubuntu almost exclusively, OpenOffice is not even comparable,

Also at the top of my mind, visio.

Sorry, you're right. Office is still ok and works fairly well. It's still about the only thing that crashes on my macbook. We can but hope that one day google docs etc catch up.

Outlook and Visual Studio are the first that come to my mind.

XBox

Sounds like a washing machine? Can fry eggs on it? Can save games to the HDD but still have to put in the damn disc every time to play it?

I'd call it mediocre but YMMV.

That would be a fine argument if these products were simply desktop apps.

Reputation matters when it comes to web apps. If you don't trust MS with your data it's perfectly reasonable to avoid using any app that would send your data to the MS cloud.

There's no way Apple would allow any other company to do a Blackberry-style Bing takeover on their phone.

And if it's just changing the default, who honestly cares?

If they change the default to Bing, it signals to me that they've stopped caring about user experience. Which would be bizarre for them since it's pretty much the whole point of Apple existing.

Wonder how much cash ms have offered.

Default settings definitely matter. It would be a huge win for Bing. The bar for most people to change settings is very high. Being the default is almost as good as being the only choice.

Flash is already on it's way to Android this year.

The iPhone will not be getting the Flash runtime but instead the new version of the Flash IDEs will be able to compile into native iPhone apps.

An application just appeared on my Verizon Blackberry the other day with a link to Bing. I clicked it and it wanted to install an app. I'm happy with Google on my Blackberry.

Bing and Deicide.

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