Microsoft tried to sell Bing to Apple in 2018, according to Google court filings

So i.e. it is not simply the fact that Google is #1 "just because" and they are sitting there milking an inferior product and forcing it on everyone through backroom deals to keep the monopoly, but they are top because they have a better product and keep winning competitive bids as a result.

I think the fact that these failed pitches even happened (and happened multiple times in the past decade or so) shows that there is quite strong competition. It's not like this was just some unheard of startup sending emails to apple and not getting a response, it sounds like proper high-level stuff between two behemoths of tech (apple and microsoft), so it was a serious thing from the sounds of it.

Personally I use duckduckgo which I think uses Bing, and I am comfortable with it, but there you go.

I'm not arguing that the search engine market is competitive, it is probably not, but deriving that conclusion from the fact that Apple did not choose Bing in favor of Google is... weak, in my opinion.

Apple negging Microsoft for not investing more in Bing and "monetizing" better (i.e. vacuuming more data), but from a business perspective, that means you should want to buy it _more_. And how does Google know?

Apple has not been able to make Siri work well and has completely fallen behind on AI/LLMs.

Apple has been trying to build a car for a decade and restarted/rebuilt teams many times with layoffs in between.

Not every culture can support every product

Turns out money can't buy everything.

But..

1. Not everything is within a company's culture to achieve, no matter how much money is thrown at it.

2. If you _really_ wanted to do something with urgency, then of course you'd consider acquiring people, tech, teams, and IP to accelerate that thing, but point #1 says you still might not succeed (and the ruins of so much M&A across the whole industry says you really need to consider that first point hard).

It mostly just sends you to Wikipedia, which means it's already better than Google.

You can build this engine but it won’t give you the richness of the data Google collects through Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Analytics etc… on its users. You could argue that Apple could try, through its own properties, but it would go against the privacy stance (essential to their image now).

Not saying they aren’t capable of dancing around this problem either, but then you start eroding your brand (which sells lots of iPhones). That’s when you start seeing that it’s just simpler to externalize this cost to a third party that you can then openly criticize and use as scarecrow to reinforce your market position, all the while collecting tens of billions in profits from them.

Yes profits, they don’t pay anything to operate Google Search. Given that Google gives them a third of revenue on Safari, that means Apple would need a product that does multiple times what they get for it today. That also requires a sales force they don’t fully have (although that’s been increasing for their own properties like AppStore and News).

Anyway, looking at it from this angle, it’s kind of genius not to change the status quo.

Just throwing money at the problem doesn't actually work.