Bloomberg: Apple held talks with Microsoft about acquiring Bing in 2020 | Hacker News Reader

Bloomberg: Apple held talks with Microsoft about acquiring Bing in 2020

9to5mac.com

83 pointsalwillis68 comments

Being 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.

Kneecapping your biggest (only?) competitor in a $500Bn market (and that’s just smartphone hardware) is a good incentive to turn down those measly $10Bn.

Add in the damage it does to your monopoly defense though and suddenly it's not as obviously +EV.

Accepting payment to not compete ... raises the question of collusion and conspiracy to maintain both monopolies.

But it’s not that. It’s like supermarkets charging suppliers to place their products in more appealing/visible shelf positions.

Well, 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.

Google is debasing the quality of it's two largest products for no good reason (search and maps), angering every user of it's terminated former products, alienated the best employees in its workforce through random number generator layoffs, and the attention of its management is currently engaged in an antitrust trial that will go on for years.

Apple can still crush them while pocketing tens of billions of their ill gotten dollars and undermining what is left of their reputation. They're just playing the long game.

My money is on them buying Kagi not Bing. Kagi Orion was built on Webkit, so maybe they've already got an equity stake?

What’s wrong with Google Maps? I’ve heard of and seen the problems with search but not Maps.

Its filled with ads now, and it’s features degraded when you’re not logged in

“Turn left at the McDonalds” is not a driving direction, especially when said McDonalds is not even visible from the other side of the street. It’s a complete joke. I’m never going back to it, good riddance.

In Europe, it likes to use unpaved tractor roads, or roads barely usable for cars in small towns as shortcuts.

When someone is not double checking, or thinks that is indeed the only way available to reach their destination, they are in for a surprise.

Anecdote, yet it happens to me all the time specially since they got the green suggestions, when traveling in country side in Southern Europe or Mediterrean islands.

As a shareholder I’m not at all sure of that. I’d rather take the guaranteed profit of the $10B per year. Even at Apple’s insane levels of free cash flow, $10B is still enough to really move the needle.

Google isn’t their biggest competitor in the smartphone space, Samsung is.

It’s Google not because of Pixel but Android.

In what sense? For instance, if Google stopped developing Android, do you think Samsung would stop making phones? Or would they switch to pushing Tizen forward instead?

> if Google stopped developing Android

Maybe someone else will try to make something from it or not.

> Or would they switch to pushing Tizen forward instead?

And it would fail. As much as Windows phones etc. The ecosystem isn't big enough. Phones are only useful because of what runs on it. Samsung only doesn't have the push to make it happen and it'd increase their already low margins.

It's not like Samsung is making lots of $$$ at the moment. For context, the government had to give their leader a get out of jail card so Samsung can be fixed. In the past, they had to spy and steal from TSMC to make their fabs work. I doubt they have the ability to create a new ecosystem.

Android collectively is still less attractive to developers vs iOS. What makes Tizen better with a drastic cut in market share?

It's impossible for Apple or anyone to build a competing search engine in the last decade.

The web is extremely hostile to web crawling to anyone but the Google bots.

Apple couldn't pull off a competitor to Google Maps, it would have no chance in Search.

Apple Maps sucked (liked, really sucked) when it first came out, but at least in the US I think most people would agree it is very competitive with Google Maps.

I guess…but it’s more than just map quality. Google Maps is good because it’s easy to navigate with AND it has a bunch of scraped search engine data behind it as well.

Unfortunately the tentacles of advertising have been creeping into Google Maps for a while - but that’s one more input into the mapping space that Apple can’t replicate (for better and worse).

And Apple also refused to give Google real time continuous location data of iPhone users in exchange for turn by turn directions.

That’s why they decided to introduce Apple Maps a year early.

In Australia the POIs are from Tom Tom it seems and they are ancient. A lot of businesses missing or long dead.

Apple can blend their bot traffic in with their customer relay traffic.

Blocking iPhones to block Apple's search bots means blocking your more valuable customers.

Which is not to say I think Apple can pull off web search, but making the crawling work isn't going to be their problem.

They're a privacy first company though.

Apple could, and eventually did, pull off a competitor to Google Maps. It launched highly flawed and incomplete, which earned its bad reputation. But it’s quite good now IME, and I prefer it to GM most of the time.

I second this. I switched to Apple Maps earlier this year and never looked back. I find the UX, especially when driving in CarPlay mode to be superior to Google’s.

Third'd. The way directions are presented tends to be a lot better and more natural.

"Apple Maps is bad" is a meme that is about a decade old and no longer relevant now.

It’s probably good if you live in North America. In the rest of the world, Apple Maps is unfortunately not very usable (navigation is fine, finding dining options and general locations isn’t)

Yes, I tried to switch to Apple Maps last month in the Netherlands, and it is really not up to date. It did not have 4/10 places I wanted to route to in my neighborhood, and had places that were closed down 6 months ago. Apple is probably only prioritizing North America at this moment.

It’s a pity because Google Maps is one of those last Google holds outs for me.

TBH, I also find Apple Maps to be generally better in the UK.

> Apple couldn't pull off a competitor to Google Maps, it would have no chance in Search.

The only problem with Maps was the bad first impression (which clearly consistently lingers to this day even though it is no longer true).

With Bing search, everyone already knows that it is inferior to Google search, so there's really no reputation hit to take like that. All they have is upside from making it better than Microsoft could and the story would be all about how close the horserace was getting.

Given that they've actually made Maps better than Google, then could make Search better than Google as well.

MS has an opportunity though.

Google search gets slated by the tech community. As does Bing.

MS have sensed the blood in the water, and realise they have an opportunity in Copilot.

I wouldn’t be surprised for the Bing brand to go away.

Copilot is a far superior brand and opportunity for MS.

Google should have learned that the thing that kills you is never what you think it is. You don’t see it coming, and Google clearly didn’t see Copilot coming.

Apple Maps has surpassed Google Maps quite a few years ago.

Heh - https://www.reddit.com/r/applemaps/comments/11jf95h/its_seri...

Apple doesn’t seem to have much interest in competing in the low-margin/“low-end” cheap smartphone market. On the high-end their relationship (in US and some other rich countries anyway) seems to be closer to what Apple and MS had in the 90s and 2000s (i.e. Apple completely dominates the market with hardly any threats).

Also the fact that they don’t rely on ad revenue (their search engine couldn’t be profitable without it) seems like part of their appeal (privacy etc.). So getting $10 billion for not doing anything seems like a great deal compared to spending billions to undercut Google with limited return.

It’s probably close to 20B nowadays, no?

The precise terms aren’t public but CNBC cited Bernstein as estimating it at $19B for this year.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/26/apple-exec-eddy-cue-testify-...

If I'm reading this right Apple chose Google 3 times over Bing.

And 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-goog...

I 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.

I 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.

Yeah, but it didn't stop them with Apple Maps.

On the other hand, Apple is good at acquiring competence. I think their incredible execution with the A- and M-line chips shows that.

Did Apple acquire any company to build A- and M-chips?

Yes

Yes, PA Semi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi

So the example used is reiterating the previous comment about "Apple good at certain things". Yes Apple is good at designing chips, and has been like that for at least decade. We all know that. But the question is what about areas that Apple isn't known to be good at and how successful they can be.

They got really good at Maps after starting out pretty poorly.

The point would be that Apple isn't good at those things, until it is. They have the money and time to get good.

> Apple is good at acquiring competence

cough cough Kagi.

(Unlike DuckDuckGo, they have no ads. Unlike Brave, they aren’t crypto tainted.)

Things can change. There was a time when search was something that Google was good at.

Of course, but that something that doesn't happen easily without hiring the top people in the field.

Siri 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.

They do have a search engine in house.

This is a front end for it that someone put together

https://luke.lol/search

Please say more: this website doesn’t describe itself at all or tell me what’s happening.

It looks like a frontend to Safari suggestions that pop up while entering a domain.

If you look at the home page, it just describes itself as “Apple Search”

These results are used when you click on “Search” at the bottom of the iPhone from the desktop and the search icon on Macs menu bar

Also covered by The Verge (from a subsequent HN submission):

<https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/28/23895055/microsoft-apple-...>

Around 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.

So is Apple building their own search engine?

hoo boy that would have been interesting

I think Apple would've seen the name Bing and being associated with it as being a net negative for brand reputation.

I 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.

I bet they would just call it “Finder”.

iGoogle

You 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...). Meanwhile, some estimates put Bing's monthly active users over a billion.

Im pretty sure it would be “Search”. And that’s it.

Maybe they’d rename it Ping. They wouldn’t even have to get new t-shirts made :)

HA! 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.

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