When Apple considered buying Bing
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Apple considers buying or partnering with Bing
Subject: Some thoughts
From: John Giannandrea
To: Adrian Perica
Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2018 21:48:03 +0000
That was a super useful meeting to understand what they have (and don’t have) and where they are investing.
Some high level observations:
1/ their traffic is small. [REDACTED] month vs us at [REDACTED] week and G at [REDACTED] day. This is presumably because they are nowhere on mobile. We have [REDACTED] weekly actives.
2/ they are investing a lot more in search than we are. They implied >1000 people.
3/ they are not launched in most of the countries I think we care about.
4/ if they need to ‘give away’ the product at [REDACTED]% TAC to get close to the current economics we would need to be really sure that its strategic for both of us. It’s a sure sign that their ad tech + marketplace is way worse (more than twice as bad in fact).
On Nov 4, 2018, at 10:45 PM, Adrian Perica wrote:
After Thursday’s session, what’s your gut on this situation? Could MSFT and us catch up or is the gap much larger in the user space than appears on paper?
Subject: Re: MSFT
From: John Giannandrea
To: Adrian Perica
Cc: Steve Smith
Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2018 16:45:42 +0000
I appreciated their radical transparency. [REDACTED]
I have been living on bing for the last few days. Mostly it works fine. Then in the odd long tail query it just doesn’t.
A recent example is “annie lennox first band”. Google gets “the tourists” as a web answer.
Bing highlights the same answer but shows a box highlighting the Eurythmics. This worries me a lot.
On Dec 12, 2018, at 10:39 PM, John Giannandrea wrote:
I don’t think bing can do better than google search for the search use case unless it spends more on it or has a better mousetrap. Not having mobile queries at scale is a huge liability for them since the most important search signal is engagement. But it is not impossible. As we noted yesterday the reason a better search engine has not appeared is that it’s not a VC fundable proposition even though it’s a lucrative business.
Can I imagine that Apple can build a search engine to compete. Yes but it’s probably not the best way to differentiate our products.
-jg
[This document is from U.S. v. Google (2024).]
Behind the scenes
From Google’s post-trial brief for the U.S. v. Google trial:
Microsoft approached Apple again in 2018, representing to Apple that its search quality had improved since the 2015 to 2016 discussions, and offering to sell Bing to Apple or enter into a joint venture regarding Bing.
From Eddy Cue, Apple’s SVP of Services, testifying at the U.S. v. Google trial:
As they got more desperate, they increased their offer to [REDACTED] percent. They offered to have us invest in Bing. And at one point, offered to us to buy Bing. And then ultimately offered to basically give us Bing.
… It was clear they were not investing, as I've stated earlier. They didn't want to continue investing, and so, to me, it was just a desperate move to get rid of it. And so I didn't see it as anything else. I mean, if it was any good, why would you — if you think of it logically, if it was a great product — I mean, we would never give away iOS to Microsoft for free, that's not something we would ever consider. So it's a weird offer.
Further reading from Mark Gurman and Dina Bass for Bloomberg: Microsoft Discussed Selling Bing to Apple as Google Replacement (September 28, 2023)
Sundar Pichai emails Google exec
On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 10:20 PM Sundar Pichai wrote:
Prasad, I need monthly reports of all losses to key competitors on an ongoing basis and if anyone from search to Apple, please email me directly on every individual cases.
- Sundar
[This document is from U.S. v. Google (2024).]
Sam Bankman-Fried’s Google Doc
Circa late 2022
Note: these are all random probably bad ideas that aren’t vetted; CONFIDENTIAL
1) File the doc with problems about the Chapter 11 process
a) Newer draft here
2) Go with the “the lawyers were in a shitty situation, and I feel really bad about that; and like most people do, they reacted poorly to difficult circumstances” narrative.
3) Go on Tucker Carlsen, come out as a republican
a) While public contributions show one thing, you see another thing including super pacs
b) Come out against the woke agenda
c) Talk about how the cartel of lawyers is destroying value and throwing entrepreneurs under the bus in order to cover up the incompetence of lawyers
4) Leak out this document to press
a) SullCrom, lawyers, and Chapter 11 are broken
5) Focus almost exclusively on the fact that we could give value back to customers and the Chapter 11 team is destroying it
6) Focus on the fact that the Chapter 11 team has no idea how to run FTX, it’s colonial, run by a cartel of lawyers
7) Come out as extremely pro crypto, pro freedom
8) Come out with a strong anti-Binance message
9) Go strong with a message of “I have funding ready to make customers whole, if only the Chapter 11 team would care about customers”
10) Go strong with the message “I’m really glad the Chapter 11 team has stepped in, they’re great, and even better I have funding that can help make customers more whole while the Chapter 11 team does what is needed to clean things up”
11) Have Michael Lewis interview me on e.g. ABC
12) Go head to head with Matt Levine on Odd Lots, really lean in to arguments
13) Lean in to the story “really it was because of tail risk crashes, this was improbable, NAV was like +$50b earlier this year”
14) “Alameda was incompetent” message
15) Radical honesty on Twitter–just explain exactly what happened, in detail
a) Include gory details, both about what happened, and about the lawyer fuckups afterwards
16) Send this letter to employees
a) Done
17) Send this EmSam tweet thread
18) Send out a twitter poll asking people what to do
19) Try to get people to supor the true narratives
[This document is from U.S. v. Samuel Bankman-Fried (2023).]
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-Internal Tech Emails