A few hours ago xo directed me to this forum thread on Channel 9. Honestly, at the first glance this seemed to me like some sort of an elaborate joke, but as it turned out, it very much isn’t! As you can read here, apparently yesterday at D7 Steve Balmer announced the new MS search engine called…. well yes, it’s actually called “Bing” =)) And here is the new Bing webpage, not a joke! Now of course there’s no talk of other Live services being rebranded as of yet, but I can see how the starter of that C9 thread could have came to this conclusion. If one of the very main features of “Live” is going to be rebranded, what are the chances that the rest of them will be too? Specially since they’ve already announce “Bing Maps” too, which is the new name for MS’s Virtual Earth. 

And now try to imagine the verbal disaster that this would entail. For instance, if WLM is going to be called Bing Messenger, would you really feel like telling someone to “Bing” you? =)) And even if it is just the search engine…. “let me Bing that for you”!! =D Can somebody tell me, how in the universe MS managed to come up with a name as ridiculous as this?? It almost looks like a very desperate attempt at being hip! Plus, I read on another C9 thread that Bing actually means “disease” in Chinese Mandarine!! Way to choose a proper name Microsoft!

Well at least now the ludicrous name matches the ludicrous policies. =P