Microsoft Pitched Apple on Buying Bing

Mark Gurman and Dina Bass, reporting for Bloomberg over the weekend:

Executives from Microsoft met with Apple’s services chief, Eddy Cue, who brokered the current search engine relationship with Alphabet Inc.’s Google, to discuss the possibility of acquiring Bing, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation was confidential. The talks were exploratory and never reached an advanced stage, they said.

This sounds like more of a “we talked to everyone so of course we talked to Apple” thing than an “Apple came close to doing this” thing.

The problem, I think, isn’t about whether Apple could make users happy running its own default search engine. It’s whether Apple could generate the profit it gets from Google for serving as the default now. It’s an enormous pile of money.

★ Monday, 2 October 2023