Microsoft says it spent $100 Billion on Bing and is stopping Google from having a monopoly

Earlier today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took the witness stand to testify in the Department of Justice's (DOJ) trial against Google. The DOJ had opened an investigation into Google alleging that the company used its position to create a monopoly in the search industry.

While these hearings are usually broadcasted or media is allowed, Google had earlier argued for a veil of secrecy which probably was the reason why media has not been allowed to live-blog the hearing.

However, Bloomberg (Paywall) has now shared some snippets from Nadella's testimony in front of the judge. In the hearing, Nadella mentioned that Microsoft has spent around $100 billion to build and develop its Bing search engine. He also noted that Microsoft believes that it can contribute to the internet search industry, despite being behind Google in terms of market share.

I see search or internet search as the largest software category out there. We are a very, very low share player. But we continue to persist in it because we think of it as a software category we can contribute to.

He further honed in his point noting that he had asked Google to add a feature to transfer ad campaigns from Google to Bing but received no response from the company.

We keep asking for them to add some features we want. They’ve asked us to go pound sand.

He also touched upon the news of Google paying Apple to keep Google Search as the default search on iOS devices. Nadella questioned if Google would continue paying if it were the only player in the market. He also said that Apple was using Microsoft to “bid up the price” it received from Google.

Do you think Google would continue to pay Apple if there was no search competition? Why would they do that?

Satya Nadella also talked about Google's dominance in the market saying, “You get up in the morning, you brush your teeth and you search on Google”. He also told the Google lawyer that Microsoft is "competing against someone who has a 97% share”.

Lastly, as per Reuters, Satya Nadella talked about the user preferences for services as well. He noted that it's easier to switch search engines on desktop and Google has made it complicated on mobile phones.

Changing defaults today is easiest on Windows and toughest on mobile

This connects back to Jonathan Tinter's testimony (Paywall) from last week where he claimed that Microsoft had to concede and make Google the default search engine on its Surface Duo smartphone in order to receive the Android license from Google.

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