All That I Know (About Technology)

A rumor started to circulate early yesterday that Apple and Microsoft are engaged in discussions over the displacement of Google search on the iPhone. According to BusinessWeek (source), Apple is considering using Bing as the search engine on the iPhone. The reasons that the authors gave for this move included:

• This was a financially motivated decision. Microsoft was offering Apple a bigger revenue slice of the advertising pie for incorporate Bing than Google.
• This was an effort to thwart Google’s recent jump into mobile. It seemed that Google was moving in on Apple’s territory with their introduction of the Nexus One device.

While some may buy into this rumor, there’s very little reason to believe it. Here’s why:

Apple is in the business of designing beautiful devices with exceptional user-experience for the consumer market. Google has dominant position in the web search market. Google reached this point by creating a simple, user-friendly search engine so having Google Search on the iPhone makes for a perfect match. While Google may not want to share more of their search revenue, they’ve bowed to the pressure of News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch when he proclaimed in November 2009 that Google was stealing his paid content (source) and that he would switch to Bing if he had no other option.

Regarding the competitive threat, there are two reasons that Apple may not be worried. First, John Paczkowski of AllThingsDigital wrote about a rumor that Microsoft is planning to release a Zune Phone in the next couple of months (source). In case you’re wondering, this rumor originally surfaced back in late 2008 (source) but this is the FIRST time that there’s thought that the phone will be pink. Currently, there’s no proof that Microsoft or any other phone/mobile OS marker is going to magically recapture Apple’s market share with their mobile offering. This rings true considering that Nexus One sales estimates reached a paltry 20,000 in the first week of offering according to mobile analytics service Flurry (source). If the Zune rumor is taken as fact, then Microsoft is a rival to Apple as much as is Google so there’s no real rush/need to switch.

In my opinion, it feels more like Apple is playing a good game of chicken with Google and Microsoft is just caught in between.

There’s rarely a day that goes by where Microsoft and Google don’t challenge each other. They battle to control every aspect of our digital world, including email (hotmail vs. gmail), the browser (IE vs. Chrome), the desktop (Microsoft Office vs. Google Docs) and of course search (Microsoft Bing vs. Google Search). While Google has continued to gain ground on Microsoft, Yahoo and others, a new search competitor, albeit small, called Twitter has emerged.

Why Twitter? Well, besides serving as social networking tool for celebrities, Twitter also provides a stream of breaking news and real time events. For example, if I am looking to learn about the latest developments in SharePoint, I avoid the search engines because the news that I’ll read there will be at least 24 hours old. Instead, I search for tweets with SharePoint as a word or hashtag in Twitter. The search results present me with a quick list of the latest developments.

Both Microsoft and Google both recognize this deficiency but only Microsoft has first responded to this need. They beat Google to the punch with the recent announcement that tweets from Twitter will now be indexed and served up alongside Bing results (source). The meshing of Bing and Twitter is good for both tools/companies:

• Search engines have always had search for content on their own. They leveraged the spiders to crawl and index new content or asked website owners to submit XML sitemaps to uncover more content and links. But Twitter serves as a new source of link that can provider links to the freshest content around.
• Developers can create applications using the Twitter API so the idea of serving ads alongside tweets was a bit complex. By offering the data to search engines, Twitter has identified a revenue stream without having to depend on an ad-based revenue model.
• Data that Twitter collects (and I’ve got to imagine that they are collecting a ton of data) is only available for a limited amount of time (typically 7 – 14 days). Many developers have used this limitation to develop an app that persists the data for an extended period of time. But if Bing or Google starts storing that data, Developers could potentially turn to these search engines to mine Twitter data.

Microsoft seems to be trying to distinguish Bing as a leader in search engines. Bing has challenged Google on other fronts, including image search capabilities, where you see an endless set of results, and video search capabilities, where you can play a video without having to leave the results. With tweets alongside search results, Microsoft may be able to take more market share from Google. While a market share loss of  may not seem to be much when Google still has a dominant position, it does translate to a greater loss when one considers that 97% of Google’s revenue is dependent on search.

NOTE: For now, you can search within the latest tweets using the new Bing Twitter engine (source).