Historically, Google has served as the fallback for pretty poor performance from Siri on knowledge tasks, which to this day often falls back to web search results.
But, if Bing (especially circa 2016) were that search provider, it would lead to confusion all the way down. It's bad enough not to receive an answer from your first attempt, but it's much worse not to be able to receive an answer at all.
The payments were certainly a sweetener to discourage exploring (or incubating) alternatives, but I agree with the article that I don't think they could have dumped or replaced Google at that time, even without the payments.
Given a broader shift from search engines to "knowledge engines" or however they're branded these days (which, in fairness, probably drew some inspiration from Google's Knowledge Graph), I think that Apple's options are wider these days.
But, if Bing (especially circa 2016) were that search provider, it would lead to confusion all the way down. It's bad enough not to receive an answer from your first attempt, but it's much worse not to be able to receive an answer at all.
The payments were certainly a sweetener to discourage exploring (or incubating) alternatives, but I agree with the article that I don't think they could have dumped or replaced Google at that time, even without the payments.
Given a broader shift from search engines to "knowledge engines" or however they're branded these days (which, in fairness, probably drew some inspiration from Google's Knowledge Graph), I think that Apple's options are wider these days.