Writing in Business Insider Hayes-Roth said the original deal was daft. Topsy made a real-time search engine covering the full archive of Twitter back to 2006.

It had the fastest and most complete coverage of the data on that social network. But Apple had no connection at all to Twitter and apparently had no use for shedloads of Twitter data. It was not interested in joining the social media intelligence game.

However Hayes-Roth thinks Apple was interested in disrupting the way people search. At the time iPhone and iPad users were spending 85 percent of their time on devices searching for stuff. What Apple wanted to do was abstract Google from your search process.

“The Topsy deal was never about Twitter, it was about Google all along. Scroll down to the very bottom of your spotlight search... In case you simply must scratch your old-school, browser search bar itch, there's your option: "Show More in Bing."

Once Apple had worked that out, it did not even need to run Topsy as a business anymore and could safely moth-ball it. It was apparently happy to spend $200 million just to stop its fanboys using Google to search.