"Bing"?

Microsoft has announced that the name of their latest-iteration of search is going to be named "Bing".

I get it. Search is important. Of all the different things you can do online, search is probably the most lucrative, directly and indirectly.

I'm sure a lot of thought went into the name. It's catchy, has a good vibe, without actually meaning anything. Of course, it won't work. People will go to Google for the same reasons they have been. It hasn't let them down. It is predictable. It isn't perfect, but people are used to the imperfections, and work around them.

No, Microsoft, you actually have to do a magnitude better than Google to take over search. Look at the effort put into trying to push Microsoft off the desktop. Tons. After spending millions of dollars and man-hours, between Apple and the OSS community, they've shaved off a few percentage points of the desktop share.

Google does a lot of things: gmail (for domains, even), this site, search, photo sharing. A whole bunch of stuff, but it doesn't work together all that well. Didn't Microsoft get in trouble for trying to make stuff work well together just a little too well? What happened to that attitude?

Maybe this time is different. Heh.

What makes this worse is that if/when it fails, it will reinforce the belief that Microsoft is in its waning years. That could easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy.