Hacker News Reader

I disagree. They could earn a windfall or lose entirely on it. At the end of the day, other companies cannot fork over $20B to play.

View on HN

Microsoft cant afford $20B? They're literally bigger than Google by market cap.

Not can't-can't, but realistically they can't. Per TFA:

> Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that Google's claim that search users have choice is "bogus," while confirming that efforts to compete for default status for Bing failed, despite Microsoft being willing to take billions in losses. At one point, Microsoft even offered to sell Bing to Apple, but Apple rejected that deal, allegedly because the deal it had with Google was just too good to let go.

Had they offered say 25B+, what would have Apple done? They offered a worse deal, but could have offered a deal which beat Google's deal.

I don’t consider just Microsoft to be healthy competition personally

There aren't many search engines nowadays. Anyone that does not use Google will probably end up on Bing. DuckDuckGo and Yahoo are still repackaging Bing results last I checked, and alternatives like Brave Search or Kagi are still very niche.

Don’t care.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com