Microsoft’s Bing has been added to the iPhone, Apple announced during its
Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) on June 7, joining Google and Yahoo.
“Microsoft has done a real nice job on this,” Jobs
reportedly told the audience during his keynote address, according to live
blogs of the event. However, Google will remain the default search engine.
Earlier this year, rumors circulated that Microsoft and Apple were in
discussions over making Bing the iPhone’s default search engine. “Apple and
Google know the other is their primary enemy,” an unnamed source “familiar with
the matter” told
BusinessWeek on Jan. 20. “Microsoft is now a pawn in that battle.”
When previously contacted for confirmation of those talks, a
Microsoft spokesperson said that the company “does not comment on rumors or
speculation.”
Porting Bing onto the iPhone will likely allow Microsoft to gain some
additional market share in the mobile search-engine space, which is currently
dominated by Google. According
to analytics firm StatCounter, Google occupied some 97.83 percent of the
global mobile search-engine market by June 7, with Yahoo claiming 1.19 percent
and Bing following in third with 0.38 percent. In the United
States, those numbers were virtually
identical: Google held 97 percent, followed by Yahoo with 1.9 percent and Bing
with 0.75 percent.
Other
firms have presented a somewhat cheerier outlook, with Nielsen estimating
at the beginning of the year that around 86 percent of U.S.
mobile searchers used Google, followed by 11 percent for Bing.
Even before Google CEO Eric Schmidt
stepped down from Apple’s board of directors in August 2009, Apple and Google
seemed pitted to do battle in the smartphone arena. Research firm Gartner has
predicted that Google Android will become the second-most-popular mobile OS in
the world by 2010, surpassing the iPhone, and the operating system has already
seen its market share rise on a tide of devices from HTC
and other manufacturers. That sort of competitive prospect could very well have
Jobs, along with his executive team, searching for any way to blunt Google’s
momentum.
For its part, Microsoft has recognized the importance of expanding its Bing
brand onto the popular iPhone platform. As far back as August 2009, the
company delivered a Bing iPhone and Mac software development kit (SDK) for
download on its CodePlex community development site. That SDK provided the
ability to easily query Bing from within a Cocoa or Cocoa Touch application,
perform synchronous and asynchronous queries, and search Bing for Web, Image,
Video, News and Phonebook results.
During a talk at AllThingsDigital’s D8 conference on June 1, Jobs dismissed
ideas of launching Apple into the search-engine arena. “We have no plans to go
into the search business,” he told an audience. “We don’t care about it—other
people do it well.” His intention, it seems, is to let Microsoft and Google
battle for mobile dominance, although Apple’s recent purchase of semantic
search company Siri suggests that another game may be afoot, despite those
denials.
Enterprise Mobility News & Reviews 
