Seems like a fairly simple business decision for Apple.<p>They are receiving $19B in annual revenue today by having Google as default search engine (which is all profit for them).<p>Or they could spend billions on the acquisition of Bing + more billions annually to run Bing.<p>Spending huge sums of money. Or receiving huge sums of money. Which would you prefer?
In light of recent AI advancements, deciding not to buy a search engine seems like it might have been a good decision.<p>A lot is going to change in how search, and the associated business model, works in the next few years.
Why does neither Microsoft nor Google nor Apple take the lead and offer free LLM answers like Google offers free search results?<p>Is that because there are simply not enough GPUs out there to do this at scale?<p>If so, it will become really interesting once that constraint goes away. There might be a shift in the search space like there was a shift from analog to digital photography.
The article makes it a little fuzzy if Apple would have bought Bing outright, taking it completely of Microsofts hands, or if they would have bought access to including it in Apple products.<p>Had Apple bought Bing they'd most likely have taken it private and not offered its search API to others, effectively preventing the creation of search engines like DuckDuckGo and Ecosia.
"The money generated by the Google deal was a key reason why Apple declined acquiring Bing, according to the people" .... "with knowledge of the matter"<p>At current P/E and an estimated $18bn the deal is worth half a trillion $.
Ultimately though it’s clear that Google and Microsoft place high value on Apples customers, who are much richer and spend more money than customers using Android or other devices.<p>No company has that kind of user base that Apple has. They do this by designing the best products and services for a very high premium price that attracts those users. It’s remarkable that they can release a phone for $1600.00 (pro max with 1TB storage) and sell millions of them every year.
They don‘t need Bing. They‘re working on their own AI, and AI will replace all search engines. ChatGPT is already slowly but steadily killing Google as we speak.