It has been about a year-and-a-half since the Windows Live™/MSN Search™ was rebranded into the ‘Decision Engine’ known as Bing™. Though it is not our default search engine, and we don’t understand this ‘Decision Engine’ business, our mobile app developers and marketing team have been pretty impressed with the Bing Maps™ sophistication and user experience design. Bing Maps utilizes Silverlight™, Microsoft’s dark horse RIA development platform. We have been Silverlight fan’s since its beta release in 2007.

Sometime last year we heard rumblings that Apple® and Microsoft® were in talks to make Bing the default search engine on the iPhone™, which sounds pretty confusing given their competitive history. However, the technology sector can be an incredibly political place and it looks like a few things led to this unlikely partnership. One of the main factors is Apple’s contentious relationship with Adobe®/Flash®. After Steve Jobs released a scathing letter to Adobe last year, it was unclear how they were going to remedy the lack of rich plug-in capability. The other factor is Google®. The Steves (Ballmer & Jobs) are looking to team up to make a competitive run against Google in the mobile space, and they both need each other to do it. Apple has the market share, while Microsoft has the increasingly impressive search history (albeit less powerful than the mighty G). They both bring solid hardware to the table.

It looks like Apple and Microsoft are indeed working together; Microsoft has announced the release of the Bing Maps SDK for iOS. According to Pocketnow.com, "The Bing Maps SDK for Apple’s iOS platform offers developers a set of Objective C classes for applications that run on iOS-powered Apple iPhones within Xcode."

What does this allow mobile app developers to do?

As the Pocketnow article outlines, the benefits to iPhone app developers are pretty significant. Opening the SDK to iPhone developers allows them to leverage the map database, as well as the road, aerial and hybrid map styles. Additionally, iPhone developers will have access to the location services using the iPhone’s GPS and will allow adding pushpins to the map functionality. This release gives them a stronger and more developed database and structure to integrate into apps.

What is the benefit to iPhone users?

This benefits not just development, but the user as well. The iPhone’s mapping features have always been solid, but this partnership will only make them better.

This might be a bold prediction, but we are guessing that this is a test partnership. Because Apple ditched Adobe almost entirely last year, we believe that Apple may leverage the Silverlight mobile framework in the near future. Given that the iPhone has been eclipsed by the Android in terms of market share and Flash-friendliness, they are going to need to solve this issue soon.

This is a huge benefit to iPhone users, as the lack of Flash/RIA has been one of the major complaints over the past four years. People like their videos, and really hate when websites look entirely different on their phone.

We are looking forward to seeing how this partnership turns out.