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

https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/28/bloomberg-apple-held-talks-with-microsoft-about-acquiring-bing-in-2020/

by alwillis • 3 years ago

83 68 3 years ago

9to5mac.com

outside1234• 3 years ago

hoo boy that would have been interesting

gjsman-1000• 3 years ago

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

dangus• 3 years ago

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.

addicted2• 3 years ago

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

tmpX7dMeXU2• 3 years ago

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

voisin• 3 years ago

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.

addicted2• 3 years ago

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.

cmcaleer• 3 years ago

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

IvanMilatForPM• 3 years ago

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?

__blockcipher__• 3 years ago

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.

mcphage2• 3 years ago

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

jaimex24• 3 years ago

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.

ffgjgf12• 3 years ago

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.

gigatexal• 3 years ago

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

spacebanana7• 3 years ago

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-...

PlunderBunny2• 3 years ago

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.

tmpX7dMeXU2• 3 years ago

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.

PlunderBunny2• 3 years ago

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

anon373839• 3 years ago

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

pohl• 3 years ago

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

jmbwell• 3 years ago

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.

scarface_743• 3 years ago

They do have a search engine in house.

This is a front end for it that someone put together

https://luke.lol/search

callalex3• 3 years ago

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

epberry• 3 years ago

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

choppaface• 3 years ago

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...

candiddevmike• 3 years ago

So is Apple building their own search engine?

dredmorbius3• 3 years ago

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

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

innagadadavida• 3 years ago

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.

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

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