Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has said unfair tactics used by Google led to its dominance as a search engine and in turn thwarted his own company’s rival programme, Bing.
Mr Nadella said Google’s dominance was due to agreements that made it the default browser on smartphones and computers. He downplayed the idea that artificial intelligence or more niche search engines like Amazon or social media sites have meaningfully changed the market in which Microsoft competes with Google.
In the 1990s, Microsoft faced accusations it set up its Windows software in ways that walled off applications made by other tech companies, just as Google is now facing accusations of shelling out billions of dollars each year to lock in its search engine as the go-to place for finding online information on smartphones and web browsers.
But Microsoft has spent billions of dollars trying to mount a serious challenge to Google with Bing and, at one point, even tried to buy Yahoo for more than 40 billion dollars in a bid that was rejected while Steve Ballmer was still the software maker’s chief executive.