May 04
On stage at BlackBerry World 2011 this morning, Steve Ballmer announced that RIM had decided to work with Microsoft to bring Bing search to all new BlackBerry devices. This isn’t too much of a surprise: there’s no way RIM would give Google more market share by working with them, and it’s no doubt that RIM has a few grudges with Google over the rising popularity of Android biting into their handset sales.
Ballmer dissed Android by calling their development ecosystem “chaos,” and similarly tossed a barb at Apple claiming their environment was too “limited.” Microsoft, presumably, is right in between, and perfect for BlackBerry. Still, the real winner here is Microsoft: even though users may opt to install Google search on their BlackBerry devices, having Bing search deeply integrated into the BlackBerry experience will be a boon to Microsoft.
RIM said that Bing would be rooted pretty deeply into the BlackBerry OS, even down to on-device system search, and Bing would provide location services, maps, and driving directions as well. We’ll have to wait to see more when RIM starts rolling out new BlackBerry devices with Bing search built-in, but that won’t be much of a wait.
[via PCMag]
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