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Comment by mucle6 | Hacker News Reader

If apple wanted to or thought they could make a profitable search engine, wouldn't they have already done it?

The question is not whether Apple could make a profitable search engine. The question is whether they could make a search engine more profitable than the billions they are getting paid each year by Google to make Google search the default.

Also the cost opportunity.

If Apple decides to make a search engine and eats $100 billion out of Google's $500 billion profit (made up numbers), Google will just spend back $100 billion (or whatever constitutes a blank warfare check) for year into completely annihilating Apple's presence. They will literally stop people from finding any page that even remotely mentions their 'AppleSearch' and also deprioritize a bunch of other products too unless if you type out, exact word, 'AppleSearch' or whatever it'd be called.

So now you're Apple, here's a question: Will you spend $200 billion fighting back? When will this stop? You're Apple, and this is a stupid move.

Not as profitable as monopoly. Sharing monopoly profit with Google is more profitable for both and loss for the consumers.

Both Apple and Google make less profits if they compete against each other, but consumers benefit from two search engines trying to compete against each other.

Apple does not like to compete. They would rather call it spatial computing and price their product in an astronomical band than risk being seen as yet another VR headset competitor.

They will never make a search engine.

On the other hand, they have already made a search engine. Which you don’t think of as one, and which provides a boost to their ecosystem tie-in.

They've been making the iPad calculator for years, who knows how many years they could have spent on developing the search engine

They've been trying to make a car for the past decade, arguably an easier task than making a search engine.

A car is definitely not easier than a search engine. Also they canceled the car.

It absolutely is much harder to make a search engine (at least a good one). The dominance of Google in that space for so long should have made that obvious.

or it makes it obvious that Google has had a monopoly for reasons other than the difficulty of making a search engine (this is the truth.)

That’s bullshit, Google came after a bunch of other worse search engines and ate all of the market share because it was so much better.

If you think they got it some other way, you weren’t using the Internet in the early 2000s

How they took over is a completely different subject from how they maintained dominance.

how exactly do they maintain dominance on the desktop, with Edge / Safari being the default browsers on a new machine ?

that was the point. a car is much easier to make, and they couldn't even do that after 10 years.

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