Monday 23 November 2009

Microsoft and Murdoch vs. Google



(Agencies) Business news today is that Bill Gates's company, Microsoft, is in talks with the Rupert Murdoch News Corporation empire aimed at forming an alliance against the almighty Google. Sources say that Microsoft is willing to pay the Murdoch newspapers (including The Wall Street Journal, The Times, The Sun, etc. etc.) to remove themselves from Google and appear exclusively on the Microsoft search engine, Bing. Discussions were apparently started by News Corporation, though these are very much in the early stages of negotiation. Murdoch has often said he wanted readers to pay for access to his online newspapers. Microsoft, for its part, has spoken to other publishers about taking their sites off Google, according to The Financial Times, which adds that “this is all about Microsoft hurting Google’s margins.The Gates company relaunched its Bing search engine in June and has signed alliances with Yahoo for 10 years that regulators in the US and Europe are looking into.

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