Microsoft's Google challenger is not a search engine Microsoft likes to take simple, everyday technologies and deliberately inflate them, making them seem greater than they really are. The benefits of Windows 95, Windows Vista, .NET, and every version of Office and its related "information worker" applications have been blown out of all proportion in their time. Microsoft can't …
The existence of a "landscape" will limit this "Bing"'s market penetration?
Well, against your Corel, OpenOffice and Linux I give you Netscape, *the* browser of choice when IE went live.
Corel had a nice market. Doctors' offices and lawyers' offices seemed to run on their office suites for many years. But they failed to build to their target markets in any real way, with the result that in the end there really wasn't much difference between their word processor and Word.
The failure of OpenOffice had more to do with it not coming close to being a replacement for MS Office than any "landscape", and in the development teams for it not putting in any real effort to deliver those functions. It simply didn't have features that non-geeks understood, needed and wanted to use (pivot tables for example).
Linux on the desktop is an attractive idea, but impractical unless you know something about computers and are willing to mess around under the hood. This is far from a consumer-oriented product. How many toasters would you sell if every time you wanted to buy one you had to take the cover off it so you could set the line voltage, number of bread slices it would take and so forth? I'm eager for the day a Linux distribution passes that milestone, but none has yet.
Each of the examples from the article is in fact a demonstration that if you seriously want to go up against a MS product you had better understand your market and play to its expectations rather than your own. MS plays this game very well.
As for the connotations of "Bing", I thought of the old crooner rather than the younger loser. Why this is significant escapes me though.
No, I don't necessarily think this Bing will be a Good Thing for Mankind. But it isn't going to fizzle just because Google is there and the Big Guy In The Playground.
Then again, anything's better than Wolfram|Alpha, judging by my attempts to use it.
Recursive name like gnu etc.
Ballmer's Google obsession is obvious to all. This makes the "ing" part of the name obvious. So all they needed was to choose the first letter.
Aing? WTF? how do you say that?
Bing? Yeah maybe: B == Balmer or Bill
Cing? Nope is that pronounced Sing or King?
Ding? Sounds dented.
Eing? Same as for Aing.
Fing? Maybe but will get called F***ing.
Ging? Nope Jing or Ging?
Hing? Sounds too Asian.
Iing? As per Aing?
Jing? Sounds too Asian.
King? Fu...
Ling? ummm
Ming? Asian
Ning?Asian
Oing? As per Aing?
Ping? Asian
Qing? Somebody will bitch there's no U. Though "Qing wants U" is catchy.
Ring? No, just finished 6 months of therapy for XBox RROD problems.
Sing? Got Songsmith already thanks
Ting? Asian
Uing? Like Aing
Ving? Bloody Germans/Dutch/Afrikaners will say Fing.
Wing? Bloody Germans/Dutch/Afrikaners will say Ving.
Xing? Asian
Ying? Asian
Zing? No still got some Z stuck to the bottom of my shoe from Zune.
Well that pretty much leaves Bing.
"But they failed to build to their target markets in any real way, with the result that in the end there really wasn't much difference between their word processor and Word."
You may be right for the general market but the funny thing is, I still fall back to WP8, (just checked the file dates, 1997) for stuff you still can't do in Word or OpenOffice. Try and have left justified and right justified text on the same line for example, something that's pretty common in headers and footers. Its an absolute disaster in Word/OpenOffice and is as easy as Alt+F7 in WP. Word can only do justification by paragraph so the only way to fake it is by creating a table.
And didn't you just love WP's Reveal Codes mode? :) Being able to edit the control codes in the data stream is like falling back to Unix stuff like nroff/troff.
That the previous owner of Bing pocketed some serious wonga from Microsoft for the domain name....
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://bing.com
http://web.archive.org/web/20041210181943/http://bing.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20070113223154/http://bing.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20080106094125rn_1/au.bing.com/
Hmmmm... Looks like the Aussies might have downed a few tinnies of Fosters.
Bing is obviously the sound an old cash register makes when it opens so a cashier can take payment. Highly appropriate considering MS' decision to try and pay people to use Live Search via their CashBack program, that it irks them to no end that it isn't the other way around yet and that even Yahoo isn't willing to help for a fair buyout price.
Cancel that emotion.... Registrar Name: Markmonitor.com
Chances are the original owner never knew it was Microsoft behind the bid and, although it was a catchy 4 letter .com they would not have realised its 'real' worth. It would be really nice to know if they are feeling a bit sick at the moment....
Brilliant!
---
I myself was thinking more in the line of *bling*, as the real purpose in Bing's life is to serve advertisements to the nets wanderers. A "decision engine", ha! We all know what that means. It means our search engine has turned into a robo-salesman. And seeing how we all love salespersons, and how we all like sub-turing machines interfering with our daily workflow, we are all just gonna love this.
All we need now is a paperclip "I see you are looking on the internet for 'russian bride', what would you like to do? 1) Order one online 2) See pictures 3) See vids 4) Read what other people have to say about their 'russian bride'" ... ad nauseum.
The problem is that Google has search (as it stands) tied up - it's not going to be possible to out-Google Google. Google itself came into a fairly nascent market and redefined it, giving us ideas like relevance, peer-linking and so on. And as various tech pundits put it, the 80s was the decade of IBM, the 90s was MS' decade and the 00s has been the decade of Google. So the time is ripe for change, but the only way that it's going to happen is by going back to the core of what people want from their internets and trying to make it easier for them.
So I can understand the logic, even if the execution could be better.
Decision Engine?
Should I install Windows or Linux ? - I think we could guess the answer
What about, Should I leave my Job ? - Will there be sufficient scope to enter the required parameters?
or, is it the modern equivalent of "lucky dice" roll a double six, and stay away fron snake eyes?
It's time for MS to charge less for their products. Clearly they have too much money to waste on HORSESHIT.
Microsoft's track record at redeveloping something is pretty dire. 95, good, 98, meh, ME, shit, XP good-ish, Vista, shit.
MSN search, shit. Not really leaving themselves much room to deteriorate into (perhaps that'll force them to make it good instead?)
I guess they did marginally improve office with the latest ribbon bull.
The Microsoft-Bing-Decision-Engine™ is rolling into town!!!
soon the MBDE-police will be breaking down your doors and ripping out your googles and replacing them with bings!
KZRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT
To make a Bing-Decision-Engine stew you will need;
* 5 cups of BING! - (the soap you can believe in!)
* One monkey brain (if this is not available an Android[oops, careful!] I mean... cybernetic life-form Decision-Engine will suffice)
* A bag of bollocks so large it will leave the entire population of Munich as Eunuchs!
Mix it together and what have you got? bippity, boppity boo! A BING! Decision-Engine for you!
Yes, it doesn't make a lot of sense, but then neither does Microsoft....
Bing! is the sound-effect that goes along with the cartoon light-bulb that will appear when anyone tries to use this. Probably because of the realisation that it really is MS little paperclip behind the scenes.
Anyway, as for all the BS about wanting decisions, I got there first with my site. Don't want to be censored, Ms Bee, so I won't even try to say the name.
I tried to search for 'Bourne', being my home town and a place of some small historic interest.
I got a dozen pages about Mr GreenGrass's kinematic extravaganzas and the novels of Mr Ludlum. In German, presumably because I am connected to a T-mobile hotspot.
I appended the county name to the search, and it returned the wikipedia article, a yell.com search (in german), uk.local.yahoo.com/Lincolnshire/Bourne/Florists/uk100004027-s-13379.htm and similar formless dross.
Doesn't seem any cleverer to me.
There's one side of this the article did ignore, though: The method Microsoft used to make Internet Explorer the (still) most common browser while also killing Netscape dead: Leverage Their Windows marketshare. It will be alot harder to do that for this kind of situation, but watch for "integration" between Office and web-browsing (sorry "decision engine" access) to push anyone who buys or upgrades their PC towards Microsoft's pet project, while doing everything they can to make Google's tools not work easily for users. Regardless of what they call it, Bing will be the default for everything Windows 7 does, you watch.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
