Being paid $10b a year by Google to be the default is a good incentive not to buy or build your own search engine unless you’re certain it will be successful.
Kneecapping your biggest (only?) competitor in a $500Bn market (and that’s just smartphone hardware) is a good incentive to turn down those measly $10Bn.
Well, yeah, there are supermarkets involved. But that's hardly all of it.
There are to vertically- and horizontally-integrated monpolies, both running their own supermarket chains (app stores), with their own real estate monopoly networks (brand A and i smartphones), each of which grows and processes its own food and consumable products (software apps), as well as the logistical back-ends for distributing and managing that (brand A and i smartphone OSes), in a market in which other independent vendors exist, and Brand G pays brand A (which offers OS and smartphones i, not A) an absolutely gobstopping premium to both not promote third-party products and refrain from developing and promoting its own product, not by buying preferential shelf placement but by buying all shelf-space, by default.
Apple could, and eventually did, pull off a competitor to Google Maps. It launched highly flawed and incomplete, which earned its bad reputation. But it’s quite good now IME, and I prefer it to GM most of the time.
I second this. I switched to Apple Maps earlier this year and never looked back. I find the UX, especially when driving in CarPlay mode to be superior to Google’s.
It’s probably good if you live in North America. In the rest of the world, Apple Maps is unfortunately not very usable (navigation is fine, finding dining options and general locations isn’t)
Yes, I tried to switch to Apple Maps last month in the Netherlands, and it is really not up to date. It did not have 4/10 places I wanted to route to in my neighborhood, and had places that were closed down 6 months ago.
Apple is probably only prioritizing North America at this moment.
It’s a pity because Google Maps is one of those last Google holds outs for me.
> Apple couldn't pull off a competitor to Google Maps, it would have no chance in Search.
The only problem with Maps was the bad first impression (which clearly consistently lingers to this day even though it is no longer true).
With Bing search, everyone already knows that it is inferior to Google search, so there's really no reputation hit to take like that. All they have is upside from making it better than Microsoft could and the story would be all about how close the horserace was getting.
Given that they've actually made Maps better than Google, then could make Search better than Google as well.
Google search gets slated by the tech community. As does Bing.
MS have sensed the blood in the water, and realise they have an opportunity in Copilot.
I wouldn’t be surprised for the Bing brand to go away.
Copilot is a far superior brand and opportunity for MS.
Google should have learned that the thing that kills you is never what you think it is. You don’t see it coming, and Google clearly didn’t see Copilot coming.
Apple Maps sucked (liked, really sucked) when it first came out, but at least in the US I think most people would agree it is very competitive with Google Maps.
I guess…but it’s more than just map quality. Google Maps is good because it’s easy to navigate with AND it has a bunch of scraped search engine data behind it as well.
Unfortunately the tentacles of advertising have been creeping into Google Maps for a while - but that’s one more input into the mapping space that Apple can’t replicate (for better and worse).
In what sense? For instance, if Google stopped developing Android, do you think Samsung would stop making phones? Or would they switch to pushing Tizen forward instead?
Maybe someone else will try to make something from it or not.
> Or would they switch to pushing Tizen forward instead?
And it would fail. As much as Windows phones etc. The ecosystem isn't big enough. Phones are only useful because of what runs on it. Samsung only doesn't have the push to make it happen and it'd increase their already low margins.
It's not like Samsung is making lots of $$$ at the moment. For context, the government had to give their leader a get out of jail card so Samsung can be fixed. In the past, they had to spy and steal from TSMC to make their fabs work. I doubt they have the ability to create a new ecosystem.
Android collectively is still less attractive to developers vs iOS. What makes Tizen better with a drastic cut in market share?
Apple doesn’t seem to have much interest in competing in the low-margin/“low-end” cheap smartphone market. On the high-end their relationship (in US and some other rich countries anyway) seems to be closer to what Apple and MS had in the 90s and 2000s (i.e. Apple completely dominates the market with hardly any threats).
Also the fact that they don’t rely on ad revenue (their search engine couldn’t be profitable without it) seems like part of their appeal (privacy etc.). So getting $10 billion for not doing anything seems like a great deal compared to spending billions to undercut Google with limited return.
As a shareholder I’m not at all sure of that. I’d rather take the guaranteed profit of the $10B per year. Even at Apple’s insane levels of free cash flow, $10B is still enough to really move the needle.
Google is debasing the quality of it's two largest products for no good reason (search and maps), angering every user of it's terminated former products, alienated the best employees in its workforce through random number generator layoffs, and the attention of its management is currently engaged in an antitrust trial that will go on for years.
Apple can still crush them while pocketing tens of billions of their ill gotten dollars and undermining what is left of their reputation. They're just playing the long game.
My money is on them buying Kagi not Bing. Kagi Orion was built on Webkit, so maybe they've already got an equity stake?
“Turn left at the McDonalds” is not a driving direction, especially when said McDonalds is not even visible from the other side of the street. It’s a complete joke. I’m never going back to it, good riddance.
In Europe, it likes to use unpaved tractor roads, or roads barely usable for cars in small towns as shortcuts.
When someone is not double checking, or thinks that is indeed the only way available to reach their destination, they are in for a surprise.
Anecdote, yet it happens to me all the time specially since they got the green suggestions, when traveling in country side in Southern Europe or Mediterrean islands.
I would be amazed if Apple didn't have a search engine developed in-house that was 'all ready to go'. Not to say that I think they will deploy it, but they would be silly not to be ready.
Siri and “results from the web” already use an Apple internal search engine. It is crawled by AppleBot and integrated with the OS. There’s just no web form front end.
I would amazed if it was any good. There are things Apple are good at and there are things they aren’t. Web services? Intelligent data processing? I can’t say they’ve got great track records in either area.
So the example used is reiterating the previous comment about "Apple good at certain things". Yes Apple is good at designing chips, and has been like that for at least decade. We all know that. But the question is what about areas that Apple isn't known to be good at and how successful they can be.
Around 2016 when Apple released Messages with extensions, the gifs search feature called #images used Bing to crawl gifs, the biggest reason being it was safe and filtered by AI. That turned out so horrible that Apple ditched Bing in #images. This probably cemented Google’s spot.
You aren't comparing apples to apples with those numbers. Bing has 100 million active daily users. Apple has about 2 billion registered "active" devices, which means they were used within a 30 day period. In this case, you are comparing daily active users for a particular service with monthly active users for an entire device. It's not clear if any Apple service reaches a lofty DAU.
Apple hasn't released daily active users for any of it's services, but it has argued recently that iMessage has less than 45 million active users in the EU (https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/04/imessage-app-store-gatekeeper...). Meanwhile, some estimates put Bing's monthly active users over a billion.
HA! Thanks for that reminder. I belly laughed when they launched that, and I can’t even tell you when it died because it never really took off in the first place.
