Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer just made an appearance at the Blackberry World conference to announce that Microsoft and RIM are bringing Bing search to BlackBerry devices. What’s surprising about the move is while Bing will be an app for Blackberry devices currently in the market, it’s going to be embedded in the code itself to allow for deeper integration for future devices. As a result, new BlackBerry smartphones and the PlayBook tablet will default to using Bing for search and mapping.
This puts Microsoft at a delicate position, as it also has it’s own smartphone ambitions. In one hand, it needs to take steps to try and stop Google from gaining the same search monopoly it achieved on the PC space. On the other hand, Microsoft also has its own OS, Phone 7, which directly competes with RIM’s Blackberry devices.
Source: Engadget