Are cameras liars? Have they always been liars? What do we do when our cameras and our photos apps aren’t even trying to capture the world as it really is? All of that is to say, we talk a lot about the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro this week. Plus more Android stuff, streaming price hikes, and much more.
The government is in the middle of a trial with Google, heading toward one with Amazon, and in general trying to change the way we think about monopolies. Also: Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial has begun, and it has already been eventful. All that, and an ebook debate, on the flagship podcast of the Sherman Act.
On the stand in US v. Google, the Microsoft CEO said he’d do just about anything to make Bing better. Google’s lawyers said he should have been doing that for decades.
A huge part of Google’s defense in US v. Google is that it’s not illegal to build a great product. And to prove that that’s all that’s happening here, Google lawyer John Schmidtlein has spent the last 60 minutes reminding Satya Nadella of Microsoft’s decades of bad decisions about Internet Explorer, Live Search, Windows Phone, and all its other browser and mobile screwups. He even has an internal poll that is headlined: “Our Mobile Story Sucks.”
Nadella is mostly just responding “that sounds right” and “correct.” He’s not arguing that Bing is better than Google — he’s arguing that it’s impossible to be better than Google. And Schmidtlein says no, it’s just that Bing sucks. And that’s your fault, not ours.
One recurring theme in Satya Nadella’s US v. Google testimony is his fear that the AI revolution could make it even harder for upstart search engines to compete. He worries publishers will sign exclusive deals that let Google use their data to train its models — meaning no one else can crawl that data.
“I worry that this vicious cycle I’m trapped in,” Nadella said about a world in which Google can dominate by outspending rivals to prevent anyone else from building a better product, “is only going to get more vicious.”
We’re about 90 minutes into Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s testimony, and his stance so far has been simple: Google’s status as the default search engine has crushed Bing not just as a business, but as a product. Without scale and user data, he said, there’s just no keeping up.
Nadella also said he was prepared to give Apple all of the economic upside of a search deal if it made Bing the default. And he estimated that might cost Microsoft as much as $15 billion a year — but it’d be worth it to make Bing a bigger and more competitive product, he said.
I’m in the building for another day of US v. Google, the big antitrust search trial. On the docket today: Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, who I incidentally ran into in the security line. I suspect he’ll be asked a lot of questions about Bing, selling Bing to Apple, Bing AI, “making Google dance,” and more. Word in the hallway is we’re likely to be in open court most of the day, too.
I also just learned who’s up after Nadella: Sridhar Ramaswamy, the former head of ads at Google and the CEO of Neeva, the search engine that says it died at the hands of Google’s monopoly. Gonna be a wild day, friends!
