Microsoft Rebrands Live Search As "Bing" 443
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.'"
Long-term pattern (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:My first thought... (Score:2, Interesting)
Well technically, what you're describing *IS* marketing. Creating buzz through advertizing and branding are but one facet of the big picture of marketing.
MS is better at marketing in the opposite direction. They sneak their products in under your nose so that all you know is their products. When this strategy is not an option, they try to do the whole branding thing, and fail miserably at that.
I'm not sure it matters either way though. I hate when companies get too much selling power through any marketing techniques, be it MS, Apple, or Google.
What seems more important to me, though, is that Bing is supposed to be a 'decision engine'. I feel like Google's search is so successful because they largely keep it simple in terms of 'making decisions' for the user. I think a huge flaw in a lot of the design of MS products is that they tend to insult the user by making a lot of decisions for him. Windows does it all the time by hiding known extensions, hiding system files, etc. I think they might be headed in the wrong direction if they think they can help users use search engines better than they have been for the past 10 years. I think we know how to find what we need.
Some got style, some don't (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
They're asking to be sued over that moniker (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Hotels in Dublin (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:They're asking to be sued over that moniker (Score:2, Interesting)
It's an utterly stupid and non-descriptive name for a search engine, anyway.
I'm no M$ fanboi, but I'm gonna have to let them off the hook for the name choice. Yahoo! and Google are also utterly stupid and non-descriptive names for search engines. Microsoft is trying to create buzz and picked a word that people might actually use as a verb, like Google. I don't think that'll happen, but I guess one never knows. I can think of worse names; at least they didn't use a Web 2.0 name generator [dotomator.com] for this...