Microsoft Discussed Selling Bing to Apple as Google Replacement

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.

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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.

Apple should rebrand it as “Ask Jobs”

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&#x27;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.

&quot;The money generated by the Google deal was a key reason why Apple declined acquiring Bing, according to the people&quot; .... &quot;with knowledge of the matter&quot;<p>At current P&#x2F;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.

[dupe]

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.