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Apple Deal Responsible for Google's Dominance in Search, Says Microsoft CEO
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The only non-collusion ( between Apple and Google) way that Apple is getting a sweeter deal is if there is competition. So Nadells is asserting a tautology. There is no competition ( "bogus search market") and at the same time there is competition for Apple to bid-up the price that Google pays ( If there was actually no competition Google would pay much of anything for the default slot. )
He is arguing both sides mainly to get better leverage for Microsoft. Hoping that the government moves the market to scaffold his not-so-competitive product.
He also makes this assertion.
If he is technically correct then Google isn't necessarily paying to keep out competition. They are paying to make the product ( search results ) better. It is basically like buying a faster machine. When making your product better is a "illegal monopolistic" practice then 'monopoly' has a warped notion. The government busting that up into smaller fractions means everyone search product would get worse. If 'bigger' is a technical necessity which would preclude it from being a 'anti-competitive' practice.
I think Nadella is a bit wrong there. There are likely ways to get better. Microsoft spent billions on that ChatGPT stunt and it hasn't gotten them any more market share. This is a contributing reason why Google remains on top because the competitors are doing 'dumb stuff'. Taking a 'bot' that is largely meant/trained to write fiction and thinking you were going to get a 'best of class' search results was goofy. Pretty likely that 'fiction' (hallucinations) wre going to get looped into the results and somewhat frequently would get a bigger 'garbage in / garbage out' results.
If Google was paying Apple alot and NOT improving their product in any way ( just purely stopping people from using anything else), then that would be suppressing competition.
I suspect that both Apple and Microsoft both have bought into the notion that higher volume of the combo of 'queries and click results' gets a better search product. What Microsoft is saying here is that Apple is electing to take a peice of the action with Google. The 'bidding war' is largely a farce ( in case of any antitrust action). That it is largely a collaborate action by Apple and Google to build up a better search results engine and Apple taking a cut of the action.
If it would benefit Apple end users to have two better engines then Apple could take less money from Google and the end result would better for the entire user base. It is VERY FAR from Apple normal where they are trying to use just one supplier. iPhone usually has more than one screen vendor. Pretty likely Apple doesn't just have an Amazon AWS account only for their compute outsourcing. etc. etc. etc.
If Apple is participating with Google just to exclude Microsoft (or anyone else) from offering a more viable search product then that would be an oligopoly issue. It really isn't a "mono" ( single) player action.
We shall agree to disagree, I guess. That "logical fallacy" is being used in several other lawsuits claiming the same actions take place.
Sure, but as far as I know this isn’t the case in the USA
Oh it is, example how Google search is the preselected option in all android phones, how Google services ties in to their ad sense by antitrust measures. The target isn’t Google search in USA vs google.
Sure but still not part of the issue at large, and is largely just a tiny part of a giant case:
As in the context of the anti trust investigation and the CEOs witnesses testimony, apples contribution to the partnership is completely irrelevant because they aren’t questioned or criticized.
It can be the case in the U.S. Right now, Google is the focus of the Google/Apple agreement and if the court decides it violates antitrust laws and should be dissolved, there would be no reason to go after Apple.
The issue being addressed here is the "Apple deal" which is about two different companies (Apple using its browser dominance and Google with its search dominance) having an agreement that is allegedly being used to unfairly (illegally) allow Google to maintain or increase its market power, dominance, control, etc. in search.
"It's 2004, you get up in the morning, you brush your teeth, and you browse the web on Internet Explorer," said Nadella. "With that level of habit forming, the only way to change is by changing defaults." Nadella went on to say that Microsoft is able to use its ~95 percent market share to improve web browsing, further reinforcing its monopoly. He said that it's "bogus" that there is choice in the web browser market.
Apple, Samsung, AT&T, LG etc this is a standard thing they do. Incentivises the partner to make Google services the standard, and extends it by sharing the revenue Google proportionally earns by them making it the standard service.
There are zero collusion between Google and Apple. And nothing like that is suspected.
He is objectively correct as have been admitted by Google. but that isn’t at all what he is asserting. The fact Google have such a large data source gives them an incredible advantage to improve their algorithm.
It’s the incredibly sticky market influence of default option have.
This is an antitrust issue.
Again this case involves hundreds of different companies that Google have used to enforce their market dominance. According to the DOJ that is.
You can read the case here :
U.S. and Plaintiff States v. Google LLC [2020]
It's an antitrust lawsuit brought by the US Government against Google.
Apple, or other device makers, are not being accused of being parties to illegalities. They are not co-conspirators in breaking any law.
The antitrust laws are probably not used enough by the US federal government. Regardless, the basic argument is that Google is just too big and uses its size to create an environment that is exclusionary. Hence "antitrust".
The US probably has a good point. But I suspect the judge will not really want to break up Alphabet, but will just order Google to stop using certain practices.
See my comment upstream.
AltaVista is not available for comment. Nor Yahoo, which I think still owns the IP.
I think you are misunderstanding a bit. It’s not a browser that people would be selecting (in a scenario where there is no default option). It’s the search engine. Safari would still be the default browser for iOS and iPadOS. The choice would be which search engine to use with Safari.
It wouldn’t take hours (or be extremely difficult) to choose a search engine. Heck, many people would simply click on the option for “Google” without a second thought because that’s what people are most familiar with. But not having a default that Google pays billions to obtain would at least give other search engines a better chance at competing for users.
But the choice itself would add another… handful of seconds maybe. Obviously it would take longer if people took the time to throughly and carefully research each and every option… but that’s almost certainly not going to happen in most circumstances, lol.
This trial is about Google but a DOJ antitrust case against Apple is expected too for yet to be specified charges. If the court decides in this Google case that the Google/Apple agreement violates antitrust laws and should be dissolved, there would be no reason to go after Apple for that as the issue would already be taken care of.
No. I understand that. My point was that the same argument used for the manual assignment a search engine (not giving preference to one over the other) could be used with regard to browsers and other tools. Once you agree that creating a default is BAD, then you can logically attach the default or preferred app in other areas like a default browser, email client, media player, etc.
Google trounced yahoo! with a search engine that had a completely different method for ranking search result that proved more relevant to the User.
Their new algorithm’s codename was “back rub,” and ranked a site higher in proportion to how many other sites linked back to it.
(A web site, page or piece that many other websites cited was considered to have more “authority” than other pages, articles and sites. SEO jockeys were soon begging other websites for link-backs or at least to permit them to include their link in an article’s Comments if it didn’t violate the site’s rules for “shilling” in Comments sections and forums.)
Users quickly found that it yielded superior and more satisfactory search results. (I’m not aware of a superior search engine in terms of quality results since! — Bing certainly ain’t it!)
Yahoo!’s crude method was to count how many times the User’s search term appeared on a site. So, for SEO, webmasters were copying and pasting, like, the “word” music over and over again to improve their music site’s ranking in yahoo! search results.
(Like “music, music, music, music, music, music,…” ad infinitum, or, say, “developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers,…” etc.)
The html didn’t display this repetitious string of the same word on the actual page you saw, but yahoo!’s crawler did count them.
Google’s algorithm made it much harder for SEO jockeys to “cheat” and manipulate rankings on its search engine and crawler.
But it isn’t Google’s higher quality search results alone that account for its dominance; its branding, global name recognition and Google’s use as a verb in common parlance worldwide cemented them as number one and continues to.
People say, “google it,” but I don’t remember ever hearing anyone say, “yahoo it.”
(And, “bing it”? Forget about it.)
This phenomenon is a killer advantage and happens quite infrequently in Marketing. “Tivo-ing” was a verb that worked for a while.
I believe Google’s continued use as a verb accounts for a large percentage of its enduring success and impenetrable dominance.
(Which, btw, is why getting rid of the Twitter brand, and with it, “tweet,” “tweets,” “tweeting,” “tweeted,” — words that had woven themselves into popular parlance the world over — will prove in time to have been a huge mistake. “X it”? Sounds like “exit.” Doesn’t work.)
Moving on…
Google then crushed it with in-browser email. Gmail blew away yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail, Hotmail and all others at the time to, today, account for about half of the estimated 347 Billion emails sent every day globally!
But as for both app and web-based email approaches, Apple’s Mail app accounts for a whopping 60% as the top email client, followed by gmail at about 28%, Microsoft Outlook at a mere 4.3%, Yahoo! Mail at just 3.4%, Google Android Mail at a paltry 1.7% all the way on down to Windows Live Mail barely registering at a negligible 0.1%.
(Notably, though, Apple’s email client app allows email accounts from not just iCloud, but gmail, Microsoft Exchange, yahoo!, AOL. and Outlook .com)
Google’s success with gmail over other web-based email services at the time had a lot to do with the fact that the gmail service provided 1GB of storage —a hundred times the amount any other email service was offering at the time.
Google’s name recognition and reputation at the time played a role in gmail’s success, but also the fact that gmail is a short, two syllable word that rhymes with email. (Go ahead and dismiss this as trivial if you want, but the fact remains, it proved an invaluable “intangible asset” to the company in terms of Branding and Marketing and top-of-mind recognition — unlike anyone else.)
Better Branding and Marketing trump better products allllllll the time.
A counter example of a Google marketplace failure, relatively, is its Pixel phone lineup. It accounts for a distant third place among Android phones at just 2.46% market share in North America (although it’s recently been gaining traction in Japan for some reason).
The reasons for its unimpressive showing include:
1.) “Pixel” is too common an English language word to be solely associated with a product (as opposed to the less-frequently-used English language word, “Kindle,” for instance).
2.) Consumers just don’t associate Google — the company and the Brand — with phone manufacturers. Google is perceived as an Internet company and just isn’t known for IRL products.
So, no matter how good “Pixels” are, they sell in comparatively low numbers — far lower, ironically, than competitor phones that run the very Android operating system Google itself makes! Plus all the key web apps that come pre-installed on their competitors’ Android phones.
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But you were scalding everyone in your original post for only reading the title, and not the article, but the title and article were in alignment. You can’t expect someone to read an article, and every article it references before making a comment on it. We come to macrumors.com to get a gist of what’s happening in the tech world, not to do extensive research and fact checking on the content.
In the end, what may happen is that you will need to do the additional step of selecting your default web search engine when you first set up your iPhone.
Maybe… 🤔
(Sorry.)
Still, it does go to why so many people choose to stay with Google despite being given the choice of other options.
P.S. Does there exist a search engine reviewed/rated as better than Google? Higher quality results? I’d certainly stop using Google for a better one in a heartbeat.
“Bing is still bad and bloated”
You’ve just given the definition of a Microsoft software product.
Or if it were Jeopardy, “What is a Microsoft product?”
Agree.
btw:
∙ literally
∙ way
∙ , like,
∙ , right?
∙ disingenuous
∙ agency
∙ atomize
∙ performative
∙ good faith
∙ bad faith
∙ not OK
∙ clout
∙ cringe
∙ a cope
(These are just some of the words and phrases “way” overused on the Internet/Social Media/YouTube/podcasts/streaming, that I wish would go away by 2024!)