It seemed like an impressive win for Mozilla when the new three-year, $900 million deal with Google was announced. The Foundation derives the bulk of its funding from that search deal and in return Google gets billions of search hits. But that deal may pale in comparison to what Google pays Apple.
According to one analyst, they could be coughing up as much as $1 billion to be the default search engine in Safari on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac systems. There’s plenty of number-crunching that went on to arrive at this figure, but there’s many reasons to believe it’s at least in the ballpark. No phone has been more sought-after than the iPhone since its debut, and the same is true of tablets and the iPad.
Business Insider brings a little hyperbole into the equation, saying that if the iPad continues to grow that it’ll surpass PCs in 5 years — at which point an Apple switch to another search provider could be devastating for Google. They base this speculation on the recent news that iPhoto has dropped Google Maps as a location provider, which some feel is an indication that Apple no longer needs Google at all.
Would such a move really crush Google? No, of course not.
BI is ignoring the insanely rapid growth of both Android and Chrome — where Google is, and always will be the default search option. There’s also a new generation of Google TV boxes on the way. While it would certainly make a dent if Apple signed on with Bing, Google would be just fine on its own. It’s still the only search engine people use as a verb in conversation, after all.
More at Business Insider
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