Microsoft Discussed Selling Bing to Apple as Google Replacement
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
They are receiving $19B in annual revenue today by having Google as default search engine (which is all profit for them).
Or they could spend billions on the acquisition of Bing + more billions annually to run Bing.
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.
Google is apple's main competitor and building an actual rival might be extremely beneficial for them.
Google supposedly makes more money from this arrangement then the spend, which means of apple can run a successful search engine they can take more of the profit.
Apple has loads of cash which they look for ways to invest, Google shows that search engine can be an immensely valuable investment.
Obviously there are other concerns, chief being consumer sentiment here I imagine.
A lot is going to change in how search, and the associated business model, works in the next few years.
"Many people ask me whether LLMs will make web search engines less valuable, but the opposite is actually the case. LLMs make web search more critical than ever, since the combination of LLMs + web search is what produces fresher and more accurate chat results."
This is true, but what he didn't mention is where the the biggest source of pre-training data is from. This was revealed earlier this week by his colleague Mikhail Parakhin, CEO of Microsoft Ad and Web Services, in the Google antitrust trial. Apparently he revealed "Bing Chat and Google Bard leverage indexes." [1].
A point on which I speculated on back in February [2].
[0] https://twitter.com/JordiRib1/status/1707103407050477772
[1] https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1706866080130498939
[2] https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/02/will-chatbots-kill-the-searc...
Is that because there are simply not enough GPUs out there to do this at scale?
If so, it will become really interesting once that constraint goes away. There might be a shift in the search space like there was a shift from analog to digital photography.
Instead, I'm using Kagi, and feeding it old school search queries. Which provides me results I want in the first three slots, all the time.
Why fix something ain't broken?
Well, too bad that that social construct supplies you the tokens that allows you to buy food.
Or do you imply that food is not real, because everything leading to it is also unreal, even if it's physical (e.g.: money). If that's the case, try to survive without it for a couple of months.
> and I've not seen yet Google maps fail to find me a public transport
This is because Google Maps doesn't use LLMs, but standard and deterministic indexing methods working on hard data provided by governments.
Even if you had the GPUs, compute and electricity cost money:
https://medium.com/@zodhyatech/how-much-energy-does-chatgpt-...
Had Apple bought Bing they'd most likely have taken it private and not offered its search API to others, effectively preventing the creation of search engines like DuckDuckGo and Ecosia.
At current P/E and an estimated $18bn the deal is worth half a trillion $.
No company has that kind of user base that Apple has. They do this by designing the best products and services for a very high premium price that attracts those users. It’s remarkable that they can release a phone for $1600.00 (pro max with 1TB storage) and sell millions of them every year.
And why is it that someone tries to show how expensive Apple products are, they always list the highest end, most tricked out product? "oh, a Macbook Pro costs over $5000 dollars, but you can get a Windows laptop for only $450!"
I'm typing this on a desktop Mac that costs less than a typical video card on a PC. But hey, I'm "rich".
So? The galaxy s23 ultra 1tb has msrp of $1619.99
https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/galaxy-s23-ultra/buy/
During that whole time I've also owned a Windows computer and I've spent even less in the Microsoft app store. I'm not sure I've ever spent a dime on Linux (other than ordering some distros on CD before I had a good internet connection).
> It’s remarkable that they can release a phone for $1600.00 (pro max with 1TB storage) and sell millions of them every year.
It's not that remarkable. I keep my phone 3 years so it works out to a little more than $1 / day factoring in trade-in or resale at the end of that time. A lot of people can afford that.
I did a similar calculation for my current phone and it came out to be $12 per month if I keep it for 4 years, which I thought to be too high.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_S...
it's actually quite remarkable that apple's phone _can_ be made with the level of component quality, at this price point. Similar feature phones from other manufacturers are just not quite on the same level of quality, even at a higher price point. You might even consider it as "cheap" (for what you get).
This is actually why i think apple has such a hold on their marketshare. It's not just lockin on the ecosystem.
Stuff so great you'd have to pay me to use it. In my books, Apple prices are just a tax on people who are bad with computers and organizing their own stuff in the same way lotteries are a tax on not understanding basic math.
Feel free to downvote, I've met such people in senior SWE positions
> Even a number of Linux kernel maintainers are on MacBooks
They aren't running MacOS on them though, are they? I'd really like a citation on this if you think they are.
That's kind of the beauty of it. You don't have to be good at computers to use Apple devices and get things done. I think people forget that nobody buys a computer because they want to use a computer. They buy one because they want to run Office or GarageBand or Photoshop or Portal etc...
As in, I am "forgetting" that I am an exact clone of the "the average user", whoever that even is, instead of knowing precisely what I like and respect, and what I don't? Nope.
My first use of an Apple was 1999 when friends asked me to help them get on the internet when their parents were away. Never had used an Apple before, took me like 30 mins, all the while feeling insulted by that one-button mouse that was completely unusable without the modifier key on the keyboard. That was my initial impression -- this has to be a joke -- and everything I saw and used since then just confirmed it. From users not knowing what a file is, to devs constantly having to jump through hoops to keep software running because Apple has some new hoops to jump through.
If it's good enough for you, that's fine. Doesn't change that it's not good enough for me. Training wheels are great for zoning out on auto-pilot, they just suck when you're fully focused and would prefer to be able to make tighter turns.
The average user is getting so exploited and fucked over every single day, that what they think they want because they don't know better doesn't impress me in the least.