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What war other than the bidding war for talent was Jobs threatening?

• shadowgovt 4y ago
  At the time, Google was the default search engine for Safari. Apple could have changed their opinion on that. Google was also trying very hard to build and maintain a coalition of smaller browsers (at the time) that can compete with IE's complete stranglehold on the technical web ecosystem by virtue of its sheer mass. Apple is a notoriously fickle partner in any kind of technical coalition (note how they got bored with other companies dragging their heels on the usb-c standard and released their own standard several years earlier). They had the leverage of both their own browser and their mobile phone platform to position against Google or towards Microsoft if they chose to.
  • milemi 4y ago
    Meh, even without the mobile platform, which they didn’t have in 2005, there were no good alternatives to Google search then and switching the default to something else would have hurt Safari more than Google. My money is on the bidding war.
    • shadowgovt 4y ago
      Don't underestimate Jobs's willingness to be a petty asshole. At that time, Yahoo was still in play and Apple could even have been willing to back MSN. History might have played out very differently if most search traffic from the Apple platform was going through MSN instead of Google.