My enemy's enemy
For this reason, the assertion by Business Week today that Apple and Microsoft are in talks to make Bing the default search engine on the iPhone, makes sense.
Microsoft is desperate to ensure Google doesn't dominate the mobile search market in the way it does on PCs. Apple must feel reluctant to do Google any favours at all given its aggressiveness in the mobile market. And the old adage of ‘my enemy's enemy is my friend' must surely apply.
Business Week cites only the usual "people familiar with the matter" as its source, but apparently the talks have been underway for weeks. One of the sources positioned Apple and Google as primary competitors to each other, with Microsoft merely a pawn in that battle. How times change.
The biggest reason these tech giants are so keen to have as big a piece as possible of the mobile Internet pie is not to sell hardware, or even software, but services and advertising. Apple is clearly not happy with Google's move to dominate the mobile web display and app display advertising in the way it does search, which is why it countered Google's AdMob acquisition by snapping up Quattro at the start of this year.
The story concludes that, even if it happens, the deal may be short-lived. It's certainly not like Apple to allow itself to be too dependent on any third party ($150 million bail-outs notwithstanding), and presumably it would ideally like an Apple product to be the default search engine on the iPhone. In the absence of one, however, it seems to have decided that Microsoft is the lesser of two evils.
