By the fall of 2011 BlackBerry mobile devices will use Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engine (with Bing maps) in direct competition with Google and to try to capture location based marketing opportunities. This should not be a surprise to anyone since Microsoft’s reported a 4% decline in sales of the Windows operating system in the wake of the sales of Apple’s iPad 2 and a many other tablets including the BlackBerry Playbook. No one should really feel sorry for Microsoft however since their overall profits were up 31%, but clearly Microsoft and BlackBerry teaming up against Google sends interesting messages to the location based marketers.
Needless to say there are a myriad of competitors to BlackBerry, including the Google’s Driod which of course defaults to Google for search and maps. Of course on the iPad/iPhone default to Safari so neither Microsoft nor Google benefit. As location based marketing evolves which mobile browser is default on your device may be a game changer.
Do you think the default browser on the BlackBerry will help Bing?