In a strange move by Apple’s traditional software rival Microsoft, the Washington based company is set to offer a development kit that will allow the iPhone to use its Bing.com search engine unveiled only a few months ago. Currently, those using the iPhone are allowed to choose either Google or Yahoo as their search engine of choice, but to the awe of critics, Microsoft has embraced Apple technology by providing a Bing iPhone and Mac Software Development Kit (SDK). The kit is available from CodePlex and will be completely open source under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL).
Since both companies compete over the hand held media player and personal computer hardware market, industry experts were shocked by the unveiling of these latest Microsoft plans. Both iPhone and iPod Touch applications will be able to use the SDK to perform both asynchronous and synchronous queries of Bing and the ability to pull news, image, web, video and phonebook results.
Microsoft hopes that embracing Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch technology in this way will give their Bing search technology an edge against rivals Google and Yahoo who currently dominate the search engine industry. As of now, Google is the clear winner in this arena, taking a larger share than both of its primary rivals combined.
08
Sep