Wrong answer about a former rock star turned Apple against a purchase of Bing

Wrong answer about a former rock star turned Apple against a purchase of Bing،

The other day, we told you that a court document relating to Google's antitrust battle with the Department of Justice revealed that Microsoft had tried to sell its Bing search engine to Apple. The latter was not impressed by Bing's “search quality” and did not enter into an agreement with Microsoft. And now, all these years later, the full story is finally out and it turns out that Apple rejected Bing after the search engine failed to give a correct answer to a question about an old rock star.

A legal file submitted by Google (via The register) reveals one of the reasons why Apple decided not to buy Bing. While testing the search engine in 2018, John Giannandrea, Apple's vice president for machine learning and AI strategy, typed into Bing's text field “Annie Lennox first band.” Lennox had become a world-famous name in the early 1980s with Eurythmy and the group's “Sweet Dreams” became a mega-hit. But before that, Lennox was a member of The tourists and this group achieved a modicum of success when their cover of Dusty Springfield's “I Only Want To Be With You” reached number four in the UK singles chart.

Excerpt from court filing showing Apple's feelings about Bing - Wrong response about former rock star pitted Apple against buying Bing

Excerpt from court filing showing Apple's feelings toward Bing

But Bing's response to Giannandrea's question simply mentioned her time with Eurythmy and his previous concert with The tourists was not listed at all. He also wasn't happy that Bing failed to offer its search engine in local languages in markets that Apple cares about. Giannandrea realized that Microsoft had not made any improvements to Bing since Apple last looked at the search engine in 2015 and 2016. Microsoft had told Apple during those two years that it would improve Bing , but when 2018 arrived, no changes had been made. .

In meeting with Microsoft, Giannandrea felt that Microsoft was admitting that Bing had problems and his impression was that Microsoft “gave us a detailed presentation of what they weren't doing, probably to motivate us to say, 'Hey, what if we invested In this together we could do these things.'” However, the Apple executive came to the conclusion that Microsoft itself did not consider Bing to be one of its most important businesses. As Giannandrea pointed out, “Microsoft was willing to sell Bing, which you wouldn't do if it was a strategic asset.”