Apple Selling iPhone Spotlight to Microsoft’s Bing

It appears that Apple and Microsoft are discussing about the possibility of offering Bing as the iPhone’s default search engine. For those who are familiar with Microsoft’s bribing strategy and the recent News Corp. saga, it isn’t really big news. It is only natural for a company that pretty much paid the whole PC manufacturing industry to ship Windows to try the same thing with other products.

The cloud

With today’s industry focus on the cloud and web-based applications, it is important for big players to have a product-line that offers a whole set of tools for everyday Internet users. In other words, the search engine as a single product will not be enough to give a competitive edge to anybody, let it be Google. For example, Google search engine users have access to Maps, Gmail, Reader, Docs, Calendar and a whole bunch of applications that will answer day-to-day needs. Microsoft is trying something similar with Bing Maps as a competition to Google’s.

Mobile computing platform

Today, a third of Internet users come from mobile phones. This trend will only keep on growing in the future as better products will be released for the mobile market. It is only a matter of time before the mainstream Internet completely switches to the mobile platform. With forecasts showing Android as potentially surpassing iPhone sales by 2012, both Apple and Microsoft have no other choice than to put their efforts together in a fight for their life.

What it means to the iPhone users

Well, this is good news and bad news for the iPhone consumer. On one hand they will be exposed to a potentially worse and less mature product. On the other hand, it will bring more balance to the search engine market, forcing Google to work on it’s competitive edge by releasing better products. Of course, things could balance towards a bipolar market where both Bing and Google will be better of with what they have rather than trying to take away market share from the other player.