Apple Switching to Bing? A Major Error.

It is hard to pick a company that is doing better than Apple. When the worst thing the company has done in recent memory is the Apple TV (something that Apple calls a hobby but other companies would call a raging success) saying Apple is about to screw up is like supposing your favorite football team is doomed because they allowed an opponent to score.

Apple's success noted, there is a good chance things have changed. What Apple has been getting right is catering to the company's market, polishing the corporate image and generally being the most desirable option for users with the requisite cash. If Apple changes the default search engine from Google to Bing that will be your signal that Apple has lost a good bit of the consumer focus that has served the company so well.

The change of the default search from Google to Bing hasn't happened yet but there are rumors and good reasons to think that it will happen. The reason for the change? Apple and Google are in a corporate spat. The source of friction seems to be Google's entry into the phone market and the two companies are going at each other like five year olds arguing over the coolest Lego mini figure. You can read about the corporate catfight here, but for the click averse, it amounts to about what you would expect: "Hey, we were doing that first, you can't do that too!"

Steve Jobs seems to be great at most things, but his biggest flaw seems to be spotting the competition. That particular flaw has been apparent more than once. In the early days of computing, when Apple was selling Apple II's like dynamite sticks at a terrorist convention Steve Jobs saw the competition as IBM. Great, except the competition wasn't about hardware, the real competition was about software, and the real opponent was Microsoft.

When Apple started cozying up with Google everybody thought the two were uniting to fend off Microsoft, and perhaps the principals saw themselves in the same light. Apparently, no one at Apple thought about what would happen if Google and Apple won. If they applied both lobes to that problem, the only conclusion they could possibly reach is that Google and Apple would be in competition somewhere down the line.

Obviously, no one ever thought that far down the road. So when Google was easily able to rebuff Microsoft in advertising and online search and Apple's iPod showed a certain imperviousness with regards to Microsoft's challengers, the reason for Apple and Google to stay together was gone.

With the supposed bully sufficiently cowed, Apple and Google looked for the next place to grow. It shouldn't be a surprise that the companies both embraced smart phones. For Apple it was an obvious extension of the iPod, for Google smartphones let people use Google everywhere.  This battle was inevitable.

But since Steve appears not to have seen it coming, he's a bit miffed. Thus, hard feelings might bring about a change on your phone and in Safari from Google as the default search engine to Bing. This will be a big mistake. Google is simply better than Bing, and the switch would indicate that Steve's pride is more important than the user experience. Satisfying Steve's ego isn't something you want to see in your Apple product. On the other hand, if it happens, Steve will make it sound like the most obvious move in the world.