Apple and Microsoft: Pals Again?
June 11, 2013
I noted “Exciting New Chapter in Bing’s Collaboration with Apple”. Call me old fashioned, but I was fascinated to see the on-again, off-again relationship between Apple and Microsoft click “on”. The key point for me in the write up was this passage:
Starting this fall with iOS 7, Bing will power Siri’s new integrated web search. When users ask Siri a question either the specific answer or web search links will now be delivered automatically so users can find information even faster.
Mobile search is replacing desktop search as the go-to way for some folks to locate information. The challenge in my opinion boils down to the Apple-Microsoft magnetism versus the pulling power of Google.
Neither Apple nor Microsoft has had the business model to generate Google-scale money from search. My view is that Apple and Microsoft may be facing a quite difficult challenge.
Both companies have the resources to take search to a different place. Can these two firms deliver. The Bing index strikes me as less deep than Google’s. I no longer have current data about the number of urls indexed by Bing, but when I run queries, I find more hits in Google. Volume does not equal relevance, however. Google has a point of possible vulnerability. However, Apple has not delivered high impact search in some of its services. I find the iTunes’ search system sluggish and difficult to use. Trimming a result set to include only audiobooks is not particularly intuitive for one of my colleagues.
Where there are tie ups, there is hope.
Stephen E Arnold, June 11, 2013
Sponsored by Xenky
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