Apple and Google’s Partners | Tech.pinions - Perspective, Insight, Analysis

Pondering partnering patterns

"When it comes to Google, however, the trend is almost all in the opposite direction. Though the sale of Microsoft’s mapping and display ad businesses this week was the headline, an important part of the ad sale to AOL was that AOL would switch its search ads from Google’s to Microsoft’s. And this isn’t the first of Google’s search partners to switch sides – Firefox switched its default search provider from Google to Yahoo in the US late last year and Google has lost several points of market share as a result. Of course, there’s Apple itself. Then-CEO Eric Schmidt was on stage at the first iPhone launch event to talk about the points of integration between Google and Apple (and even jokingly suggested merging the two companies while on stage), but Apple is one of a number of companies which started out as a close partner of Google and slowly saw Google encroach on its territory and, therefore, began to distance itself. This began with the exclusion of YouTube and Google Maps from iOS a couple of years ago but has also more subtly continued with the advances Apple is making in Spotlight and Siri, both of which have switched to Bing as their underlying search engine and are pre-empting many Google searches."

Apple and Google’s Partners | Tech.pinions - Perspective, Insight, Analysis