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Comment by quizbiz | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting:

I know Apple is sitting on a lot of cash. A lot.

I think it would be fascinating to see Apple purchase Bing and rebrand it. With search built into the iPhone and the future value of mobile search in mind, I think it would be near foolish for Apple to miss this opportunity. Otherwise, no matter how well the iPhone does, Google will still always have its hand in mobile advertising money.

But what do I know?

I think it would place Apple and Google in a very interesting competitive position.

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Apple is a very focused company. They build nice gadgets and sell them for nice profit margins. Everything they do is directed toward that goal.

Entering the search business means entering the online advertising business. They don't know anything about that business; just look at how iAds is working out.

Steve Jobs himself said directly at one of the All Things D conferences something like (paraphrase), "We don't want to do search. It's not a business we know anything about, other people do it well, there's no reason for us to get into it."

That's focus. It's something that's badly needed at Microsoft.

Those are great points.

I'm not disagreeing with your premise but I would like to note that always take Steve Job's comments with a pinch of salt. At the (2003) All Things D conference, he said:

There are no plans to make a tablet. It turns out people want keyboards. When Apple first started out, "People couldnit type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this." "We look at the tablet and we think itis going to fail." Tablets appeal to rich guys with plenty of other PCs and devices already. "And people accuse us of niche markets." I get a lot of pressure to do a PDA. What people really seem to want to do with these is get the data out . We believe cell phones are going to carry this information. We didnit think weid do well in the cell phone business. What weive done instead is weive written what we think is some of the best software in the world to start syncing information between devices. We believe that mode is what cell phones need to get to. We chose to do the iPod instead of a PDA. (source: http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Steve_Jobs_No_Tablet_...)

He specifically said no tablets and Apple wont' do well in the cell phone business yet 4 years later, out comes the iPhone and 7 years on, the iPad.

Isn't the exact same reasoning for Microsoft to operating Bing? Bing is baked into WP7 pretty deep, and although sales of WP7 devices are off to a slow start, the marketplace is growing nicely, and the reviews are positive.

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