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Microsoft Rebrands Live Search As "Bing"
JacobSteelsmith writes "Microsoft is attempting to re-brand its Live Search, also known as Kumo. Bing, as it's known, is another attempt by Microsoft to lure consumers away from Internet search leaders such as Google. Microsoft has posted a quarterly loss in its online advertising business, compared to Google's sales, $4.7 billion in the first quarter. According to the Live Search blog, Bing goes 'beyond the traditional search engines to help you make faster, more informed decisions' by combining a 'great search engine' with organized results. It also adds unique tools to help the user make important decisions. It is being touted as a 'decision engine.'"
"Here, let me bing that for you."
Hmmmm... No.
So what's the new branding going to be after this one fails? Bong?
This has Monty Python written all over it.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Bing goes 'beyond the traditional search engines to help you make faster, more informed decisions' by combining a 'great search engine' with organized results.
Organized Results as in "higher rating the more you pay us"?
The Long Now Foundation
Bing goes 'beyond the traditional search engines to help you make faster, more informed decisions' by combining a 'great search engine' with organized results.
They change the search engine's name in an effort to draw a crowd, then they fuck it up by weighing it down with language that's awful damn close to the infinitely-scalable enterprise class web 2.0 productivity enhancement solution corporatespeak that makes people roll their eyes.
Ned: "Guess who!"
Phil: "Ned? Ned Ryerson?"
Ned: "BING!"
MS should seriously just stop trying to "improve" search engines. Its not profitable, labels you as a "Google clone", and unless you have some pretty neat features that can beat Google and iGoogle, you won't end up capturing any marketshare. Sure, there are some things that you could do with searching, such as desktop searches that aren't painfully slow that require tons of indexing, perhaps using algorithms to "guess" where files are placed? All that would be better for MS, but instead they go into the already saturated market with yet another search engine, how many do they have now? MSN, Live, and now Bing? Seriously, stop trying to be Google, you aren't and unless you happen to be really really good at what you do (and from past experiences in trying to be Google you aren't good at it) you won't get any marketshare despite how many ads you run and how many OEMs you bribe to set as the default homepage.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
...because the video shows a big image/background at the top. That's great, but part of the other reason Google is the leader (other than the results it produces) is the fact the page is a no-nonsense zone - sure, you've got the Google logo, but other than that, the page consists nearly entirely of blank space, or text/links. No stupid pointless pictures, no needless button images. It's fast, and it works. Once 'Bing' gets up to capacity though, I reckon it'll be dog slow, because it has useless decor. The search engine isn't the destination: So why the pointless crap?
Bing! Fries are done! Hmm. Progress, but still no dice...
True, however:
... thank god for bing."
Developer One: "You know that hot girl I met at the bar last night?"
Developer Two: "Yeah?"
Developer One: "I bing'd her."
Developer Two: "No way! What did you find?"
Developer One: "Bing says she's categorized as head of a right wing conservative group that attracts females and funnels money into Karl Rove."
Developer Two: "Ohhh, dude that sucks, maybe next time?"
Developer One: "Yeah
My work here is dung.
"Bob, where's my bong?"
"Have you tried looking underneath your belt?"
"Not that bong, Bob. The other bong."
Bing Is Not Google
Yes, on a web site focused on FOSS the readership will now complain about the name selected by Microsoft for their search engine.
Some examples of the naming accumen of the FOSS crowd:
- Ogg Vorbis
- Gimp
- Apache
- IceWeasel
- Thunderbird
- X
- Gnome
- Prefacing thousands of KDE apps with K
- Gnu
- A thousand other recursive acronyms
- etc etc etc
Microsoft may have posted a quarterly loss, but comparing that with 4.7 billion dollars of gross revenue doesn't even make sense. Did Google make a profit on that 4.7 billion and how much? That's the important question, and none of the press releases linked here have an answer.
-mkb
According to the Why Bing page:
The price predictor thing sound kinda cool (though pretty easy to clone).
But giving money back on "great products?" Is that like discounts on MS software, or some other silly gimmick? Smells faintly like desperation, that does. I guess we'll see.
So what's the new branding going to be after this one fails? Bong?
Nah, I think it's going to be "Bang" so that sentences like this happen:
"I couldn't find the answer in my textbook so I Banged it."
My work here is dung.
Ned: Phil? Hey, Phil? Phil! Phil Connors? Phil Connors, I thought that was you!
Phil: Hi, how you doing? Thanks for watching.
[Starts to walk away]
Ned: Hey, hey! Now, don't you tell me you don't remember me because I sure as heckfire remember you.
Phil: Not a chance.
Ned: Ned... Ryerson. "Needlenose Ned"? "Ned the Head"? C'mon, buddy. Case Western High. Ned Ryerson: I did the whistling belly-button trick at the high school talent show? Bing! Ned Ryerson: got the shingles real bad senior year, almost didn't graduate? Bing, again. Ned Ryerson: I dated your sister Mary Pat a couple times until you told me not to anymore? Well?
Phil: Ned Ryerson?
Ned: Bing!
Phil: Bing.
Good-bye
I'm a little confused, but as best I can figure out:
Microsoft is developing a new search engine that will replace Live Search. The new engine was going to be called Kumo, but they've decided to call it Bing instead. It's still in development and not yet available to the public, but eventually it will be online at bing.com. Presumably, once Bing launches, live.com will redirect there. The search field on msn.com (which most IE users have set as their home page) will redirect there too.
Since the new engine isn't available to the public and most people weren't aware that it was going to be called Kumo, this rebranding is a complete non-story.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
<VOICE type="Chandler Bing">
Could this branding be any more lame?
</VOICE>
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
No, but I predict people will start pronouncing it as "Bung". As in:
I went to google the answer, but this damn computer has the wrong search installed and my question went down the bung hole!
I love how the live desktop search tells you everything install chronologically after it is going to stop functioning if you remove the MS search. Well, maybe bung will finally let you find answers to technical issues half as well as google search - then MS might be able to bribe some more people to play with it's bung.
I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress -J Adams
It's just that (4) isn't clear.
If "Bing" fails, the next name will be "Squirt".
But won't that confuse the 2 owners of a Zune who have been squirting songs to each other?
I think 3 was "Try to make people believe Google is a monopoly so we can sue them and then monopolize another market." That would make 4 the rebranding effort, and I would change the "!!" at the end of 5 to "??".
You forgot "~" at the end of first sentence.
One that hath name thou can not otter
It's a great name, too bad the momentum has been lost.
And there lies the rub. Sure, there are plenty of us who still harbour deep suspicicions about Google and its motives, but those reservations pale by comparison to those surrounding Microsoft.
Once all the hype about MSN search and Windows 7 has died down, I wonder if Microsoft might be forced into a position where its most secure bastion is MSOffice. Whatever we might think of MS, the latter is still probably the only one of their products that really qualifies as a "killer".
Disclaimer: my personal preference is for OpenOffice or NeoOffice, dependent on platform.
Among Microsoft's many problems as a company is that they seem to systematically change the names of their products every few years. This is an incredibly wasteful policy. Every time they enact one of these name changes they:
- throw out years' worth of marketing effort
- break documentation and references throughout their website
- break third-party web resources, including howtos, forum advice, and other forms of community support
- force everyone who has to support the product to change all of their references, documentation, marketing, etc.
Why MS shareholders and partners don't see name churn as having a real, damaging impact on the company's long-term success is beyond me.
So what's the new branding going to be after this one fails? Bong?
Well, it would be popular with the stoner crowd..
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
"Bob, where's my bong?" "Have you tried looking underneath your belt?" "Not that bong, Bob. The other bong."
Did you try binging your bong?
Take an decent blouse of mine, it still looks like crap on me. Put it on my gf... oh alright my sister, and she looks absolutely hot in it. As Terry Pratchett once noted in a book, for the truly cool, anything they wear looks good.
MS is not cool, it is about as far from cool as you can get with burning yourself. It shouldn't try to be cool. It is like Balmer doing the monkey-dance, it don't fit. He is a boring man and if he tries to be hip, he just end up looking more foolish then he ever could just being boring.
MS search. THAT is a PERFECT name for an MS search engine. It says what it does and who it belongs to. JUST as Micrsoft Word, Internet Explorer and such are great names for a boring company.
stick with your image, it works far better then going against it. Just ask any politician who tried to rap.
Google got away with its name because it was new. MS isn't. Would you buy a IBM mainframe called the iFrame?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
How many millions (billions?!) do they spend on marketing and branding. If I paid that much, and all they came up with was Zune, Squirt and Bing .. I'd be pissed and would want a refund.
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
There's already another tech company, Terabyte Unlimited, using that moniker as shorthand for their boot manager product, BootIt Next Generation. If they've trademarked the abbreviation as well as the full name, they might wind up suing Microsoft over their use of it.
It's an utterly stupid and non-descriptive name for a search engine, anyway.
Of course I didn't RTFA, but I did visit bing.com to watch a promotional video - which surprising enough wasn't done in Silverlight. Two things about this promotional video really stuck out about how bad Microsoft really wants to be Google.
The first thing that struck me was the name. Over time Google's name has become a verb, you can "Google It" (tm) for yourself. So Microsoft innovates the only way they know how by scheduling a series of marketing meetings for their droids to come up with a name that out-verbs the competition. "Bing" there you have it, an uninspired and pathetic attempt to squeeze a brand name into our common vernacular.
The second thing that really caught my attention in the video was the first search they show. While the narrator goes on about revolutionary new ways to search the internet, he pulls up Bing to search for "Hotels in Dublin" - a natural way to search for hotels near Dublin that Google implemented into their mapping engine years ago. Just as the search itself was ripped off from Google, so are the results. A map of Dublin pops up with a number of icons, each representing a hotel exactly as Google did... years ago.
Bing's marketing narrator continues on about these "new ways to search" that feel so familiar, and well, old. I'm not convinced they have anything new to offer, but maybe if they keep saying "Bing" enough they will at least convince themselves. I think the only people who will "Bing" anything in the near future are the same ones who have always used Live Search simply because it was available by default.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
To top it off, the video doesn't really show anything that exciting or innovative. There have been a number of search services over the years that tried to organize results, and I don't know if any of them are still around (because I never switched to using them).
Microsoft always seems to come up with ideas it believes will enhance the user experience, but their track record in that area is poor. I've been using Office 2007 for over a year now, and I still run into brick walls where it takes me time to find features that were intuitively placed before. Think of headers/footers (that was the first one that caused me grief). In pre-Office 2007 releases, you would "view" a header or footer. In Office 2007, you need to "insert" a header or footer. Thinking of page layouts, the header and footer is already there--there's nothing to insert--so its not intuitive. That's just one example. I hope their categorization system in Bing doesn't try to improve the search experience too much, or they'll simply cement their position as the loss leader in search.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
not the town in North Dakota.
For my generation Bing is followed by Crosby.
I am sure the people at MSFT are to young to have that association,
Actualy it's:
They're still in step 3.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Holy mother of marketing. They'd do better calling it "Microsoft Bling", at least it'd sound like something someone might actually want to use. This may be the worst product name since Bob.
Dear Paul:
Google's UI innovation is that people want the fucking UI to get out of the fucking way. People don't want the user interface innovated in new, exciting, and distracting ways. They want you to stick to what works, and make the back end work better. If they notice the user interface, you've failed.
Love, Peter.
A "decision engine" that goes "beyond the traditional search engines" ? Doesn't it sound just like a cheap try to surf on the hype wave from Wolfram|Alpha ?
If the Slashdot crowd's reaction to a new brand has any predictive power, then Bing is going to be a big hit.
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/27/1625208
Google doesn't sound like a euphemism for sexual intercourse when used as a verb.
Also, Google is a reference to the massive number of webpages available through their service.
Bing! is a mindless word MS expects to 'sound cool.'
I'd call it an epic fail. Compare:
I just Google'd Jessica Alba.
I just Bing'd Jessica Alba.
?