Microsoft and Google prepare to fight it out, again
According to reports, a six-year legal truce between Microsoft and Google has come to an end. According to reports in The Financial Times and Bloomberg, Microsoft and Google reached an unusual truce in 2015, which expired in April of this year.
After 2012's Scroogled incident, where Microsoft's aggressive ads treated Google like a political opponent, the two tech giants were publicly seen criticising each other, largely thanks to the truce agreement.
Because of the legal truce, the rivalry between the two has been unusually quiet over the last five years. Despite being the number two search engine at the time, Microsoft was noticeably silent during the US government's antitrust suit against Google last year.
But Microsoft and Google are seemingly warming up to get back in the ring.
After Microsoft publicly supported a law in Australia that required Google to pay news publishers for their content, Google slammed Microsoft for attempting to "break the way the open web works'' earlier this year.
Microsoft urged Congress to advance the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which would "allow news organisations to negotiate collectively with online content distributors."
On the other hand, Google believed that its Google News Initiative, which aims to collaborate with the news industry, is sufficient to assist news organisations.
Microsoft also chastised Google's ad market dominance, claiming that publishers are forced to use Google's tools, which feed Google's profits.
According to The Financial Times, the Microsoft-Google agreement was intended to improve cooperation between the two companies, with Microsoft hoping to find a way to run Android apps on Windows. That clearly did not work out, and Microsoft has instead turned to Amazon to get Android apps running on Windows 11.
Before this agreement, there were some heated battles between Microsoft and Google, and they're likely to erupt again. There was a particularly bitter battle between Microsoft and Google over YouTube during the height of Windows Phone in 2013. Despite a promise of collaboration between the two companies, Google had blocked a YouTube app developed by Microsoft for Windows Phone. Microsoft was outselling anti-Google mugs and T-shirts and acting nervous about Chromebooks a few months later.
Since the days of Scroogled, a lot has changed for both Microsoft and Google, including new leadership on both sides, but Google's scathing attack on Microsoft earlier this year proves that these tech behemoths are ready to fight once more.