Rumor: Dell and Microsoft Signs Deal To Push Live Toolbar

Rumor has it that Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Dell Inc. (NASDAQ:DELL) have made a deal that involves having the Live Search toolbar pre-installed on new computers.  ZDNet attempted to contact officials at Microsoft and Dell, but they said that they do not comment on rumors and speculation.

Two years ago, Dell and Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) had a similar deal.  Dell and Google had a co-branded homepage and the computers came preinstalled with a Google toolbar.

Google has been known to be making large-scale transactions in order to push their brand as the default search.  Google finances about 85% of Mozilla.  In exchange, Google is the default search engine for Mozilla Firefox.  Google also bought 5% of AOL for $1 billion in order to co-brand search on AOL.com and partner on messaging services.  Google also has a deal with Adobe and Apple to push their search engine on customers.

Seeing how much Google has benefitted from the aforementioned deals, it would not be surprising to see Microsoft become aggressive in working with other software and hardware companies to strike similar deals.

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