Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, which has never surpassed its biggest rival, Google, could have killed off the Apple logo. The Windows company tried to sell it to the entity led by Tim Cook, but not even the iPhone manufacturer was interested in getting its hands on it.
Surely you have tried Bing at some point. This search engine has been Microsoft’s attempt to knock Google off its throne, but it is obvious that they have not succeeded. Because of this, the company could have been looking for buyers for some years. Or, at least, I was looking for them when the year 2020 was running.
Failed attempt
We all know that Microsoft is a company that is difficult to let go. Sometimes, they drag technology that has become outdated or that the world has made clear that it is not interested. But it is obvious that they have their reasons. The Bing search engine is quite logical that it has remained very halfway from its original intentions. There is no exact usage data that can be given absolute authority, but it is easy to imagine that Google is the most used option in the world when it comes to searching on the Internet.
For this reason, Microsoft would have wanted to sell Bing to a company that could get more out of it. This is how negotiations should have begun in 2020 between senior Microsoft executives, whose names have not been revealed, and senior Apple officials, including Eddy Cue himself.
Why wasn’t the sale made?
There is not much information about it, but some capsules of information have been published that help us imagine what the situation was at the time of the negotiations. From what is said, Apple could have been considering alternatives to the situation it found itself in in 2020. As we said a few days ago in another news item, Apple never considered developing its own search engine, because they considered Google to be the best. and that, really, they didn’t need to compete in that way.
But what they could have considered would have been the acquisition of a search engine that was already in operation, to which they could make adjustments and make some changes in order to improve the experience. From there, they would only have to have set Bing as the default search engine on all iPhones, iPads and other devices in the apple family. Although some users would have continued to manually enter Google to do their searches, it is obvious that quick access to Bing would have given them most valuable traffic.
In any case, what Mikhail Parakhin, from Microsoft, has said in his statements in the trial against Google in which he is participating is something totally different. He says Apple never really seriously considered acquiring Bing. This actually coincides with what Eddy Cue has also recently stated. Therefore, what the apple company would have done was play with Microsoft in order to get a better agreement with Google. The truth is that this does not surprise anyone. Parakhin himself says in his statement that “It’s no secret that Apple is making more money because Bing exists than Bing makes.” This would mean that Apple would have pressured Google to pay them more for putting their search engine as predefined on iPhones instead of letting them opt for the Bing option (both in a similar agreement or with a purchase of the search engine).
From Bloomberg Apple is also said to have halted the plan to buy Bing because they found that the search engine did not meet their demands for quality and effectiveness. In the end, Apple got what it wanted: a $20 billion a year deal to put Google as the search engine for its devices. It brings them so much money that, from Microsoft, they are trying, with these statements, to get Google and Apple to break their agreement. But the reality is that that is not going to prevent Bing from continuing to be Bing.
