Microsoft CEO Says AI Will Help Google Extend Search Edge (bloomberg.com) 17
Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said AI could help Google extend its dominance of the search market, as he took the stand Monday in the Google antitrust trial. From a report: When Microsoft introduced its new Bing AI-based search in February, beating Google to the punch, Nadella touted the technology as a way for Bing to get back in the market and make Google uncomfortable. But now, he told the judge, Google could accelerate its current lead by using the massive profits it makes from search to pay publishers for exclusive rights to content it can use to make its search AI better than rivals. Nadella also left no doubt about his perception of Google's dominance.
"You get up in the morning, you brush your teeth and you search on Google," he said. The Department of Justice has accused Alphabet's search division of unlawfully maintaining a monopoly by paying $10 billion a year to rivals, smartphone manufacturers and wireless carriers to make its search engine the default option on mobile devices and web browsers. Google has denied the allegations. To help prove its case, the DOJ hopes to use testimony from Nadella and other executives from Microsoft to show how even a company of its size and resources couldn't unlock Google's hold on the search market.
"You get up in the morning, you brush your teeth and you search on Google," he said. The Department of Justice has accused Alphabet's search division of unlawfully maintaining a monopoly by paying $10 billion a year to rivals, smartphone manufacturers and wireless carriers to make its search engine the default option on mobile devices and web browsers. Google has denied the allegations. To help prove its case, the DOJ hopes to use testimony from Nadella and other executives from Microsoft to show how even a company of its size and resources couldn't unlock Google's hold on the search market.
The Irony Alarm burst (Score:2)
Microsoft complaining about another monopoly, zzzz.
I would like to see Google have more competition, but does it have to be from another market-size abuser?
Re: The Irony Alarm burst (Score:1)
They need to search edge? (Score:2)
What did MS screw up this time that they lost their very own flagship browser?
how things have changed (Score:1)
Microsoft CEO says Microsoft is incompetent (Score:5, Insightful)
He's not wrong about the influence and reach of Google. But the obvious subtext here is that Google is technologically superior to Microsoft. America is an ostensible meritocracy, which is bullshit overall (power begets power) but there are elements of truth to it as well. Bill Gates was a more successful businessman than basically any of his peers, and that's why Microsoft dominates so many areas of computing today. It's certainly not based on technical superiority, which returns to my central thesis.
Google built a superior architecture for building large-scale web applications that we today take for granted. They were not the first to employ distributed clusters, but they were the first successful company to do so at massive scale. Microsoft was doing clustering and load balancing before Google even existed, for a couple of years anyway — they introduced the feature for Windows in NT4. They also had a distributed execution system (DCOM) from the same time.
By all sense, Microsoft should have done everything Google actually did, but they didn't, and they still haven't. It does seem sometimes like Google has peaked, maybe they're limited by their corporate structure now, as Microsoft seems to be. But they've peaked higher, too, and at least some of the credit has to go to their superior architecture. Dogfooding is a lot easier on the diet for Google than it is for MS.
Googley (Score:2)
Solving the problem creating a bigger one (Score:1)
Google continues to get worse (Score:2)
It gets increasingly hard to find useful information
Government can't fix the problem
It's trying to guess what might be relevant... (Score:2)
... that regularly fails. Instead of searching for all keywords you give them, they now throw out random words which are rare. This way they often throw out the important words which make the results utterly irrelevant.
It's likely that this trend will continue when they are using machine learning.
Weasel words and fear mongering 101 (Score:1)
"When C Suite fling mud, first they say **could**."
It's subtle, but it amounts to "LISTEN YOU UNTHINKING MONKEYS, THEM BAD, ME GOOD, THEM BAD AND SCARY, ME GOOD AND FRIEND. FRIEND!!!"
I should point out that while I mock this... this does work reliably.
The alternatives are awful. (Score:2)
Microsoft can complain about google all they want, but they have had twenty years to come up with an alternative and "Bing" is their best shot. Sorry, but you already lost me with the name "Bing", much less everything else awful about it.
They all have their own monopolies already; this is just monopolists pissed off that they can't have more monopolies. Microsoft has Windows and Office, which arguably are harming consumers by forcing them to use Windows, but it is superior to alternatives. Google has search
Why would Google want to search Edge? (Score:2)
Edge doesn't really have things that Google would want to search, as far as I can tell!
Cannot remove Bing on Windows10/11 (Score:2)
And if MS had the option to do the same... (Score:2)
If MS had the option to do what they allege Google might do, would they do it themselves? And what would they say when others complained about it?
They are complaining because they want to leverage courts and regulators to aid them in the competitive marketplace. They are saying whatever they think will help them in this regard. They are not saying this because they think the market is unfair, and would support an unfair market if it was unfair in their favour. That's just how business operates.
Maybe once AIs are reliable (Score:2)