As the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google presses on, we continue to learn more about Apple’s search agreement with the company and its talks with other companies.
Now, Bloomberg reports today, citing “people with knowledge of the matter,” that Microsoft held talks with Apple in 2020 about selling Bing, which would’ve then replaced Google as the default search engine on Apple platforms.
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Apple and Microsoft had a deal in place from 2013 through 2017, which saw Apple use Microsoft’s Bing search engine to power Siri and Spotlight search results. Towards the end of this agreement in 2016, Microsoft put a plan in motion to expand upon its deal with Apple to make Bing the default search engine in Safari on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
As Apple’s Services VP Eddy Cue testified earlier this week, Apple was simultaneously in negotiations with Google around this same time to renew their long-running agreement. Through this agreement, Google pays Apple a cut of the ad revenue it makes from searches on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
In 2016, Apple ultimately ended up renewing its deal with Google and expanding the deal to also include searches performed through Siri and Spotlight. This effectively nuked the entire partnership between Apple and Microsoft.
But come 2020, a new round of talks opened between Apple and Microsoft. Bloomberg reports that Microsoft executives met with Apple’s Services VP Eddy Cue to “discuss the possibility of acquiring Bing.” These talks were reportedly “exploratory” and “never reached an advanced stage,” Bloomberg says.
The revenue generated from its deal with Google was a “key reason” Apple’s talks to acquire Bing never advanced beyond that stage. “The company also had concerns about Bing’s ability to compete with Google in quality and capabilities,” today’s report explains.
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Also today, testimony from Microsoft VP Jon Tinter revealed new details on negotiations between Microsoft and Apple that could’ve seen Bing become Apple’s search engine of choice.
As recapped by Bloomberg, Tinter explained during his testimony today that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella met with Tim Cook as part of these talks in 2016. The idea was that Apple would team up with Microsoft instead of Google, expanding Bing beyond Siri and Spotlight to make it the default search engine everywhere instead of Google.
Tinter explained during the testimony that, because Bing was far smaller than Google, it would’ve “had to offer Apple a far larger percentage of the revenue than Google.” For Microsoft, this would’ve meant taking a massive, multi-billion dollar loss to secure the deal. Despite this, Microsoft pitched the idea to its board of directors and discussed how to explain the deal to shareholders.
“In the short term, it would have been highly negative. We told the board that we are thinking about making a multi-billion negative investment to support this,” Tinter testified today. “It was all around trying to make them confident that we could make the switch,” he said.
After those talks ultimately dissolved, Microsoft and Apple found themselves in another round of “serious discussions” in 2018. These talks, Tinter said, were focused on Apple switching to Bing search outside of the United States, but ultimately led to nothing.
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