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from the When-Elephants-fight,-it-is-the-ants-that-suffer dept.
Microsoft and Google prepare to battle again after ending six-year truce:
Microsoft and Google have reportedly ended a six-year truce on legal battles. The Financial Times and Bloomberg are both reporting that Microsoft and Google formed an unusual truce in 2015, which expired in April. The pact was reportedly forged to avoid legal battles and complaints to regulators. It meant we haven’t seen Microsoft and Google complaining publicly about each other since the days of Scroogled, a campaign that attacked Google’s privacy policies.
Now the gloves appear to be off once again, and we’ve seen some evidence of that recently. Google slammed Microsoft for trying to “break the way the open web works” earlier this year, after Microsoft publicly supported a law in Australia that forced Google to pay news publishers for their content. Microsoft also criticized Google’s control of the ad market, claiming publishers are forced to use Google’s tools that feed Google’s revenues.
The rivalry between the two has been unusually quiet over the past five years, thanks to this legal truce. Microsoft was notably silent during the US government’s antitrust suit against Google last year, despite being the number two search engine at the time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 01 2021, @06:56AM (4 children)
Number 2 search engine? What the Bing are you talking about? Only because of bundling, with operating systems, or viruses posing as operating systems. So this is a Windows Phone or Zune type of thing? Wait for the "Gates" watch, which tells you it is time to try to pick up another one of your employees.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 01 2021, @07:54AM (1 child)
Bing is a great anti-Google. If you want to hide activity from Google, just Bing it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 01 2021, @10:16AM
lollerskates
(Score: 2) by SunTzuWarmaster on Thursday July 01 2021, @01:25PM (1 child)
It is the second most popular search engine worldwide - having 2.31% of marketshare. https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share [statcounter.com]
For you other users completely out of touch with reality - #3 is Yahoo, #4 is Baidu, and #5 is YANDEX with 0.79%.
Brave Search? DuckDuckGo? Well - maybe in a few years they will replace Yahoo. At #3.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 01 2021, @09:21PM
The other thing is that DDG isn't actually a search engine so much as a frontend with anonymizer that then uses Bing and Google as the actual search engines.
I think Yahoo is this way as well (though likely without the anonymizer), I don't know about Baidu and YANDEX.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday July 01 2021, @08:51AM (1 child)
Competitors agreeing legal battle truce sounds awfully like collusion to me. You know, stuff monopolies and cartels do - not that Google or Microsoft are monopolies of course, perish the thought!
I wonder when the US administration will finally decide to Sherman their collective ass. It's way overdue.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by crafoo on Thursday July 01 2021, @12:37PM
only when they decide that they aren't paying enough protection money to politicians. if the money keeps flowing there is no need to bully them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 01 2021, @12:15PM
That would solve half our problems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 01 2021, @05:14PM
google (well android) for your portable computing needs and microsoft for desktop.
even if they battle, like two blackholes, they will pull everything along to the "in 3-5 years your cpu chip is obsolete" orbit. (obsolete because identified to be so).
your and everybody elses trajectory will be in this orbitplane; doesn't matter if you're closer to either and the battle fireworks are spectacular... both agree that you lose.