Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has a hugely ambitious plan. The new CEO of Yahoo tasked to rebuild an ailing company is hoping to convince Apple to ditch Google as its default search provider and switch to Yahoo Mobile Search for its iOS devices.
Interestingly, plans are reportedly “far along” in the pitch to Apple, with the company rumoured to have prepared detailed presentation decks. Re/code claims that the decks also contains images of what Yahoo Mobil Search for iOS would look like, as Yahoo prepares a convincing deck behind closed doors in preparation for any possible talks with Apple. After all, Mayer is said to have already have several Apple executives in mind to approach, with SVP of Design Jony Ive key among them.
Key to Yahoo’s pitch is simple: as the default search engine powering iOS, Apple is essentially providing Google billions of dollars in search revenue – a figure that will only increase over time. There’s even speculation that Google makes more money from iOS devices compared to Android devices, meaning that in the ecosystem wars, Apple is “indirectly subsidizing a portion of the major war against itself”.
To note, Google, Yahoo and Bing are all available for users on iOS, but Google Search is set as default. In fact, Bing is powering Siri’s voice control search, so it may not be too far-fetched for Mayer to pitch Apple to switch the default search engine to Yahoo. Whether this will prove fruitful is anyone’s guess.
(Source: Re/code)
