Microsoft was prepared to lose billions on an Apple deal.
On the stand in US v. Google, the Microsoft CEO said he’d do just about anything to make Bing better. Google’s lawyers said he should have been doing that for decades.
For Nadella, becoming Apple’s default search engine wouldn’t be about the money, at least not directly. “We needed to be less greedy and more competitive,” he explained. A sudden increase in distribution, he said, would give Bing an increase in what Nadella called “query flow,” which essentially just means more people would do more searches. More incoming searches means more data the Bing team can use to improve the search engine and more reasons for advertisers to come to the platform.
Ultimately, Nadella’s story was not that different from what other upstart search engines say: Google makes it impossible to compete by making itself the default search engine everywhere. Since most people don’t change their defaults, that means no other company has a chance to get in front of users and get the data they need to build a great product and build a meaningful competitor.
One frequent point of emphasis from lawyers on both sides was the way Bing and Edge are bundled into Windows. Schmidtlein pointed out that even though Microsoft bundles Edge and Bing with practically every Windows PC on the planet, Chrome and Google Search are both vastly more popular among Windows users. That, he argued, as Google has throughout this trial, proves that defaults don’t actually matter much. Nadella and the DOJ said it proved the opposite.
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