Bing On BlackBerry Deal Is All About Microsoft

What’s Microsoft’s deal with Research In Motion?

Ostensibly, the two companies are competitors, at least in the smartphone arena: Microsoft desperately wants to make its Windows Phone 7 platform a hit with both consumers and businesses, which places it in direct competition with RIM’s BlackBerry franchise. And when Microsoft finally gets around to its hard consumer-tablet push, those devices will presumably go head-to-head with RIM’s PlayBook.

Yet in the past couple of weeks, the companies have locked themselves into a deepening set of partnerships. First there was the agreement to port cloud services such as Office 365 onto the BlackBerry and the new PlayBook tablet, with RIM’s BlackBerry Servers connecting “cloud to cloud” with Microsoft’s data centres to host Office 365 data on users’ devices.

Then, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took the stage at this year’s BlackBerry World Conference to announce that Bing will serve as the integrated search and mapping service for Research In Motion’s BlackBerry smartphones.

“While Microsoft will support the top phone platforms with our cloud services,” Ballmer told the audience, “we’re going to invest uniquely in the BlackBerry platform in addition to our own Windows Phone platform.”

Getting cosy

That wasn’t Ballmer’s last mention of Microsoft’s smartphone platform at a RIM-sponsored event, and I’m betting it set more than one RIM executive’s teeth a-grinding. Anyway, Ballmer managed to stick on what I presume is the script for most of his talk. [All quotes come courtesy of my colleague Clint Boulton, currently attending the conference.]

“Effective today, Bing will become the preferred search and maps application for BlackBerry,” he said, “with regular feature placement and promotion in the BB App World carousel. BlackBerry devices will use Bing as the default search provider in the browser, and Bing is the default search and map experience for new devices presented to mobile operators both here in the United States and around the world.”

Bing’s integration with BlackBerry will deepen by the end of 2011, becoming a core component of the devices. Both Microsoft and RIM will devote resources to promoting Bing on BlackBerry’s merging of search, commerce, social- and location-centric services.

Ballmer also fired a couple of shots in the direction of Google and Apple.

“Certainly Android, the volumes have risen, but there is ensuing chaos that has caused a level of frustration, let’s just say with developers and consumers alike,” he said, before aiming at iOS: “Apple’s platform has certainly offered opportunity for application developers, but there are a very limited set of ways to collaborate and extend the experiences of their device for businesses and consumers.”

(You can almost hear those RIM executives thinking: Steeeeve, get back to talking about us.)

Microsoft hedging its bets

Microsoft is a company that likes to hedge its bets, and work all possible angles. That’s why the company’s not just relying on Windows Phone 7 to gain market share on its own merits – it’s also flinging jets’ worth of attorneys, armed with hefty patent lawsuits, at manufacturers producing Android devices. It partners with rivals like Yahoo. It touts Office for Mac even as its people scramble for a response to the iPad.

The relationship with RIM falls into that pattern. RIM’s business audience is also coveted by Microsoft. Partnership between the two companies will expose that audience to Microsoft products like Bing and Office 365. That prospect apparently supersedes the fact that RIM stands in the way of at least a portion of Windows Phone 7’s potential market-share. But make no mistake about it: even as Ballmer was touting the benefits of that RIM-Microsoft partnership onstage, it’s a pretty sure bet there’s only one company he really cares about.