Oh god damn it, we’re all gonna have to buy new phones. A day after Verizon forces its Blackberry owners to use Microsoft Bing (which crashed some phones overnight, making at least one guy late to work), BusinessWeek reports that Apple is thinking of doing the same to iPhone users. This is, of course insane.
As a search engine, Bing is arguably as good as Google. As a business, it’s much worse. While Google’s approach to competition is a fair contest of features, Microsoft’s is a series of monopolistic deals. Google would never consider paying News Corp to block its sites from other search engines. Google would not apparently edit search results to protect its reputation. (To be fair, this last example may just show that Bing actually is a worse search engine than Google.)
Bing’s biggest market share gains will not come from consumer choice. They will come from backroom deals that hurt customers. (Google has worked out default-search deals too, of course, but they tend to make them before the phone comes out so customers still know what they’re buying into.) I don’t want to be forced to use a search engine that’s focused on building market share over giving me better results. And I don’t want to wait around to see what else Microsoft will load on my phone.
I used to think the Google Phone was a stupid idea. Why did we need an internet company to provide a device for us? Now I get it: Google’s doing what Apple couldn’t do with the iPhone. They’re staying open to more than one carrier (so I won’t have to worry about AT&T’s poor reception), they’re keeping the platform open source (so I can download apps that use the phone in unexpected ways without “jailbreaking” it), and they seem determined to actually improve the damn thing over time.
Of course, the Apple-Microsoft deal is far from guaranteed. (Though it seems more likely if Apple sells its next iPhone to Verizon.) BusinessWeek says Apple might even make their own search tool (oh god please no). But my confidence is already shaken just by knowing they talked to Microsoft long enough for someone to leak the story.
I already envied the technology available on Android phones. I’m jealous of Google goggles, a camera-based search tool that blows away every existing iPhone tool. (Take a photo of a storefront, Google tells you about the business; the system gives special results for pics of books, art, landmarks, business cards, and logos too. This technology will be as game-changing as cell phones were.) I want an open app market where companies can update without a laborious approval process. I want hacking to be encouraged. I want programs to run in the background.
And to fend off its superior competitor, Apple considers making its own phone work worse.
As for you Blackberry users, I don’t even get why you’re still around after all those outages. How secure do you feel now that Verizon slapped a new search engine on your phone without asking?
