[mgreg]

It seems unclear if Microsoft was willing to pay more. From Bloomberg's coverage: "Microsoft business development executive Jon Tinter said that his company weighed making a multibillion-dollar investment in its relationship with Apple in 2016, an effort to outspend Google and make Bing the default option on Apple devices." They also offered to sell part of Bing to Apple it seems.

As to Samsung why else would they consider switching from Google to Bing? According to the WSJ [2] they changed their mind "given concerns over how the switch could be perceived by the market as well as the impact on its wide-ranging business relations with Google." This suggests Microsoft was willing to pay more.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-28/microsoft... [2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-is-spared-a-search-engin...