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Branding: Bing vs. Live
Last week was all about Bing and Wave – both products the respective companies believe will change something about what we do online. Master search engine journalist Danny Sullivan has an indepth review of Bing which is worth reading (along with his partners comparison review).
In the ”coming soon” video, Microsoft classifies Bing as a “decision engine”. The video makes it seem like a search engine.
Whether you classify Bing as a decision engine or a search engine, whether you compare Bing to Google or any other engine, I have one question for Microsoft….
WHY NOT USE LIVE.COM?
Something tells me that Microsoft hired an expensive agency which eventually (after large payments) came up with the name Bing. I’ve sat through hundreds of these type of presentations over my career and have found it funny how many times the agency misses what’s right in front of them. Now maybe the Bing name was developed in-house. Frankly it really doesn’t matter where Bing came from (note, when I hear bing, I think of the bing-bong chime on the subway when the doors close).
Live is nearly a perfect name. All of the social media techies are in love with “real-time” and Google and other engines have talked about wanting to add more real-time activities into their results. Microsoft could have worked towards branding Live as THE real-time results/decision/search engine. Real-time = Live. Everything inside of Bing could have been included along with the real-time results.
Will Bing be the next Google or the next Cuil? Who knows at this point but what I do know is that had they used the Live name for the brand, they would have been further down the better path.
Perhaps in future ads and videos we will learn what the Bing name actually means and why it was chosen for this new brand.
great point allen – amazing that in all of the other reviews, no one picked up on this. microsoft sure does some weird things…
Don’t make them feel guilty about not releasing a service called “Bing Live” :) I am sure we’ll see that soon.
I think their problem with Live was that you can’t turn it into a verb… And also it seems harder to relaunch a product in a big way when you’re using the same name. I was actually a fan of their prototype name Kumo; even though it didn’t really mean anything, it had the feel to it. Bing sounds like the name of a cheap casino in Vegas, not a search engine.
I agree somewhat with Raj’s sentiment, but I think a better name than “Bing” (or, at least, a better looking logo) could have been thought up.
By the way, Kumo means “cloud” or “spider” in japanese… which I think perfectly suits a product of this type. The problem with that name, I believe, is that it is already trademarked.
Maybe Microsoft will now use the Live.com domain for a new service that focuses entirely on Real Time??
Agree with Raj. To perform a search query, you can “Google it” or “Bing it.”
“Live it” or “Live Search it” rings as poorly as “Yahoo Search it” or “Yahoo it” (which could have caught on but hasn’t).
I think Live.com should soon showcase all MS consumer-facing web products. Bing was a good brand move, but live.com being used solely for redirection to bing.com is a missed opportunity to give their other products more exposure. Live.com should be a prominent Bing search bar + gallery of Windows Live products.
[...] from the beginning was the choice of Bing as the new name. Allen Stern took up this point but from a different aspect in his post on Bing this morning. I’m including it in the negative column because … well .. Allen isn’t [...]
[...] Branding: Bing vs. Live (centernetworks.com) Share and Enjoy: [...]
well like any other naming excercise there are many reasons for choosing one name over another. We recently chose the DocQ.com over many different choices as it the pro’s outweigh the cons. In live.com’s case, I’m sure the bad karma it has outweighed nearly any real-time connotation it may have had. Plus as everything search engine moves to real-time will google getting their first will make any real-time marketing angle on live.com seem dumb.
bing is better faster thousand times than live,try bing if bored with yahoo & google.
They should just go bing themselves for making another cuil program…