Microsoft Bing gets previewed on video
Now, we’ll preface this by saying that it is absolutely, positively, 100% impossible to draw any real conclusions about a product like a search engine without a fair amount of hands-on time. After viewing this preview video, we can also absolutely, positively, 100% say that the name “Bing” sounds more ridiculous each and every time it is uttered. Seriously, it’s a really bad name — to quote one of our commenters:
Eh, I dunno. Can you imagine someone saying “Gee, I wonder if I can find a picture of a kitten online?” – “Sure you can, why don’t you Bing it?”
Doesn’t quite work…
As trivial as it may seem, Google is such a powerful brand that it’s now as much a verb as it is a noun. Microsoft’s Bing… Will never be a verb. It does however, appear to be a powerful amalgamation of a variety of existing services. Does it have that x-factor that will help catapult it into significance? Maybe not from what we’ve seen in this video preview so far but only time will tell. One thing is certain: an $80 million launch campaign will give Bing a better chance to compete than any comparable search engine has had before it. Hit the read link for the video and let us know what you think.
Thanks, Jason!
Bing isn’t anymore ridiculous than Google.
I’m thinking Microsoft Bing is Microsoft Bob’s nephew, and should be equally successful.
microsoft’s customers have always been Dell, HP and other businesses that bought their software. not consumers. this is why they never had to worry about marketing except for little things like having the Rolling Stones play Start me Up at the Windows 95 launch.
now that they have to deal directly with consumers, MS seems completely lost on how to do it with a lot of their products.
they probably paid some agency a lot of money for this. one time my company wanted to change it’s name and we paid money for some branding company to come up with a new name. some of us found the new name a few weeks before the announcement because it was registered as a copyright and trademark. took us 10 seconds to come up with sex jokes about it and another few days for management to kill the new name
Thats all you guys got? Name hating? Gotta say thats reaching big time…
Agreed @Crown.
@alen which products do they have besides the Zune, that is failing?
I like the name… “Bing it” beats “Google it”!
The downfall of this might be that MSFT is filtering alot of the information for you and who trusts MSFT? Google gives the impression that search results are unbiased and based on popularity and links but they are constantly trying to tweak their algos to prevent people from gaming it. MSFT is going to decide who you should trust for info on health, shopping and travel? No thanks.
as in bada boom bada “bing”? why not shazam or ka-pow. seriously I think the name is lame but i’ll be glad to see another search engine. Google is great but often censored and often based on “who pays more” to ben in the top 10. Hope its good and lite (plain and simple).
First thing I thought was the scene in Goodfellas where Joe Pesci is telling the story of a beatdown he got. “Bing, what are you doing here? I thought I told you to go f@#k your mother!”
Ya, everyone had a problem with “Wii” too. It’s like you ignore the fact that most of these corporate names sound ridiculous until a brand is built.
Would have expected a little more of an understanding from a media outlet called “The Boy Genius Report”…
From the same folks who think you should squirt your friends with your Zune.
i like the name and am excited to check this out !
didn’t say the products are failing, but MS isn’t growing earnings like Google or Apple.
the server products are growing very nicely, and they go to business customers. i admin SQL Server and like the server products a lot. the linux fan boys still don’t get it why linux on the desktop is a joke.
X-Box is doing well and the games division did some good things since the 1980’s when flight simulator was the only game they had. From what i’ve read Games is pretty much a new division and mostly new hires in the last 10 years or so
MSN is a joke. They took Hotmail from the most widely used web email to a distant behind GMail. Every other part of MSN is a joke compared to similar offerings
Mobile/CE is getting killed. 2000 – 2002 everyone wanted an iPaq or the Dell version. First Blackberry became the mobile device to have, then the iphone came along. why couldn’t one of MS’s geniuses figure out that people would kill for an iPaq/cell phone device all in one.
the zune is a joke and feature wise at least a year behind the Touch. for the new one the TV out is nice, but whoever thought up HD radio needs to have some sense knocked into them and have pandora, slacker or streaming radio tatooed on their head. the touch can run almost every iphone app and is a nice alternative to buying a netbook, a kindle or any other device out there that only does one thing. the zune is just a music player.
desktop OS, microsoft is lucky that Apple wants to charge an arm and a leg for what is essentially a PC with magic pixie dust. MS needs to tell OEM’s to stop with the crapware so people’s new PC’s don’t look like a x-mas tree with flashing windows saying buy me.
PC and laptop growth is over and MS seems to have missed the mobility revolution like it’s competitors missed the desktop/server revolution in the 1990’s. we’re now at a point right around when Windows 95 was released, except the future is mobile devices and no need to have a full browser to access information on the internet. we’re now in a tech boom where you will use your phone or PDA to access information, or play any media anywhere you are. and you will use a tiny (compared to full OS X or Windows app) to access just the information you want. The ipod touch does this and will kill most of the devices in the drug store come the next version, zune just plays music. Apple is giving us the one device that can do almost anything.
the reason is apple has always marketed directly to consumers and is better at this, while MS seems completely lost except for it’s games division. It sold Windows 95 and XP to businesses and never had to market to consumers.
Alen you make some very fanboyish points. Microsoft is not doing bad by any means. And also, HD radio will come in more handy than Pandora, Slacker, etc on a mobile device such as the zune hd because with those, you have to always be connected to the internet. You can’t play last.fm without a wifi or cell radio. The zune HD has a wifi radio, but no gsm radio. You can play the radio anywhere anytime without having to worry about being out of range for wifi or in a dead zone for 3G.
@Crown – Agreed. Really dumb too – People said the exact same thing about google, yahoo and Wii…the list goes on. At this point name-hating seems like tedious, loser’s pastime. If the thing works the name works. People will be happy to “bing it”.
@Jordan
Holy shit that made me laugh out loud! How shortsighted can they be around here? Hilarious!
If Bing works as advertised, I think it could become a great new resource on the web. It seems like it would allow me to do on one web page what would now take me several tabs in Firefox.
People, don’t even let Zach get to you. You can read an article and know it’s Zach just by the amount of hate. Zach = Hater 2.0
@Alen – people said Nintendo was done between the PS1 and PS2. I don’t know if you should just write off Microsoft.
Sony thought people would pay all that money for a PS3. nintendo didn’t win, they stuck to the basic formula of the least tech advanced console. it’s just that sony screwed up so bad. even with the RROD issues the x-box 360 did well because Sony screwed up.
microsoft is allowing competitors to capture the low end of their market and this is a well known business strategy to get to the high end later on. MS and Intel did the exact same thing starting in the 1980’s. MS is losing in the mobile and netbook market and this could allow competitors to take on MS’s big cash cows in a few years. Android, iPhone OS and other flavors of ^nix are coming to netbooks because we’re in a cycle where the desktop/laptop isn’t important anymore. if MS loses this market then in 5 years they will be at risk of being attacked in their server markets. MS did the exact same thing to Sun, IBM and others. they captured the desktop and used it to capture a large part of a lot of server products.
if everyone is running non-microsoft OS’s on their mobile devices then it makes it that much easier to make a non-MS server software purchase. or a non-MS office suite purchase
as for HD radio, it’s essentially 100 year old tech. Clear Channel will let you stream any of their channels over the internet if you don’t like Pandora or Slacker. the cell phone network is very quickly becoming the killer media delivery platform with the ability to customize what you want to listen to.
it’s not going to happen next year, but at some point in the near future it will become uneconomical to maintain a system that only broadcasts radio signals. HD radio along with XM/Sirius are dead technologies.
in the next year or two so many phones will be capable of streaming any radio station from anywhere, HD Radio on a Zune is a useless feature
@ Alen – With the 7 OS’s upcoming, I don’t know if you can assume Microsoft will loose any market (except mobile and portable music). You sound like you’re expecting the eulogy for MS and I just think that’s a little premature.
“Microsoft’s Bing… Will never be a verb.”
Uh, “bing” is already a verb. When I was a kid in Maine, before we’d plant the vegetable garden, we had to “bing” or pile up the rocks we found. (The pile of rocks was also called a bing.) The OED shows this and two other verb uses.
What strikes me as strange here is that our focus is as bad as MSFT’s. Ever since Bing was announced, blogs have fixated on the name — BGR’s is hardly the first derisive comment out there. But the name is irrelevant. If MSFT had called the service “Giant Stinking Pile of Poo” but provided a markedly better search experience than its competitors, we’d all be “pooing” for info before the end of the year. (Okay, maybe THAT name would have been a deal-breaker.) Bing is just as inoffensive and near-meaningless to the average user as Google or Sprite or Camry or RAZR — if the product is any good, the name will become the product, and no one will notice how silly the name might have once been.
But is Bing really going to be any better than Live Search? If the only change is the name, then Redmond is in serious trouble….
@Alen some people buy PMP’s to be just that: personal media players. Not everyone wants a data plan attached to it, hence the iPod Touch alongside the iPhone
MS is making the same mistakes that Novell and Sun made in the 1990’s. Look at Sun now. First MS captured the low end desktop market with Windows 3.1 and 95. Then they used NT to capture the server market. NT was a piece of junk, 2000 was a lot better, 2003 even better and Windows 2008 has some killer features. the entire time all the UNIX admins were making fun of MS as the Unix market share was dropping. it won’t give you 99.999% uptime, or it isn’t 64bit or whatever.
Windows wasn’t better than Unix, but the price and features were enough to make people buy it over big iron. the whole time everyone was saying how windows can’t run in a 99.999% uptime environment. and today it can while Sun is being sold off and is a shadow of its former self.
same thing with the iphone. it may not have all the features of other phones, but the features it does have compared to the price is making it the device to have. and just like Windows, at some point corporate IT deparments will dump their BB’s in favor of the iphone if RIM doesn’t start to compete again. it’s already cheaper to give people iphones than blackberries for Exchange integration, it’s just the perception that the iphone is a toy.
rumor is that apple will keep on selling the 8GB version for $99. next year they will probably have a free version for the ultra low end. meanwhile it seems like RIM, MS and others are acting just like Sun and Novell did back in the 1990’s.
The zune is not a phone. You do not need to pay $30 a month for a data plan on a zune to get a radio, its FREE! That is why HD radio is a nice feature, you can listen to something besides your playlists, listen to news and weather, traffic reports, and listen to the TV when you are at the gym. This is a very convenient feature, and there is NO monthly charge. I wish my ipod had FM radio. As for FM radio becoming obsolete, that will not happen any time soon, so unless you are planning on buying a zune and putting it in a time capsule for your grand kids, you have no point. Its astounding how you could do such mental gymnastics to convince yourself a feature is useless to everyone just because you don’t want it, you sound like one of the apple fanbois in the zune hd thread.
Alen, you’re an idiot and your arguement makes no sense. Your arguement is that HD radio is 100year old tech?? What do you think cellular signals are? They are electromagnetic radio waves just the same as fm radio waves, am radio waves, etc.
As for pandora, or the current streaming internet website of choice, they are all very limited on a pmp like the ipod touch or zune hd as soon as you step outside of your house/school/starbucks. HD radio will continue to work when walk the street. You clearly must not get out much.
Not to mention Pandora doesnt work in Canada…