Sight of ‘the sound of found’ confounds many — Perhaps if the people at MSFT would have perhaps informed someone that they were going to throw an event, it might help get attention. Geez, what is wrong with them?
What if you took over a nationally recognized civic landmark for a publicity event visible for miles … and confused the heck out of people who saw it?
Microsoft put on a light show at the Seattle Center Tuesday night for the launch of its new “decision engine,” Bing — or “the sound of found,” as the company likes to call it. A spotlight sent a bright blue shaft into the night sky, visible for miles. Other lights “painted” the Space Needle and the arches at the Pacific Science Center orange.
However, the sight of “the sound of found” apparently inspired widespread consternation — or amusement — rather than the light of discovery. Here’s a sampling of early responses from Twitter:
McQuaid: “What is going on at the Seattle Space Needle??? Anyone know why its burned out and there is a light coming from the science center??”
redheron: “Bright light down by the space needle. Anyone know what it is? Its like the luxor or something.”
I’m not really sure it can be considered a “PR botch” if it has people (a) twittering, and (b) blog posting.
Bing isn’t bad… but seriously… why change crack dealer?
These guys are just terrible. It’s fascinating that they’ve made so much money with such terrible PR.
Aside from the Windows 95 launch and the Xbox, have they ever not totally embarrassed themselves with their ‘ads’?
Google will absorb anything of interest that Microsoft thinks of that is useful and the world will go back to normal.
It’s not that Microsoft couldn’t compete with Google, but that Microsoft has the “we drink our own kool-aid and therefore ruin our own products” syndrome.
Which only works for Windows and Office because they are widely accepted standards.
Microsoft should learn how to “find” things on my computer (using their desktop search) before attempting to find anything on the internet.
Seriously, their desktop search is the worst piece of garbage I have ever used! Matter of fact, most time even if I have the exact file name, my computer cannot seem to find it, or if it does it is so far down the list it takes several minutes to find anyway.
Hey Microsoft! Try listing by relevance!
Has anyone had success with their desktop search?
#5 – Aaron – Has anyone had success with their desktop search?
Only when using wildcards.
I’m still baffled by the name. There is a whole lot of people who associate Bing with Chandler Bing from Friends.
Changing from MSN Search to Live to Bing just smacks of indecision and a company floundering about without any direction. They should just stick to Windows and Office and give up on their internet stuff.
If they are going to do a search engine they should try something different. I recently ran across http://beta.spezify.com/ and while I’m not sure it is useful but it at least has an interesting presentation.
Does anyone have an email address for the marketing department at Microsoft? I’m feeling charitable and would like to send them a clue.
Don’t fool yourselves. No matter how bad they are, they’ll get an extra small percentage of the market from “New and Improved BING!”. I think MS currently has something like 20% of search. That means their coffers are enriched by about 18 BILLION dollars each year by search alone. I heard they are spending an ENORMOUS 100 million bucks on this advertising campaign. Chump change. All they need to do is pick up another couple of percentage points and they’ve paid not only for the advertising but for all their research and development and a new yacht for Mr Balmer. Think what they could do if they had a decent PR company…
IE sucks. But where is Netscape now?
MSN sucks. But where is ICQ now?
I like MS Office, but where are Lotus and Word Perfect now?
Whatever MSFT does is sure to become popular. The Zune was an exception.
@Nimby
“I think MS currently has something like 20% of search. ”
Actually it is 10%. Google has 70% and Yahoo has 20%.
@Luc
“But where is Netscape now?”
It’s called FireFox. Netscape was Open Sourced, it became the Mozilla Project. Then was named Mozilla FireFox and then finally just FireFox.
“But where is ICQ now?”
ICQ was primitive and gay. But MSN is hardly the dominant chat client. There is YIM, AIM, Google Chat, Twitter, IRC and far too many others to mention.
“but where are Lotus and Word Perfect now?”
Microsoft rightfully dominated that market. The user-interfaces were consistent across Word/Excel/etc. Their former competition mastered in archaic menus to keep backwards compatibility.
“MSFT does is sure to become popular”
You mean like HD-DVD losing to Blu-ray or the sheer popularity of “PlaysForSure” or do you mean the popularity of Microsoft’s search efforts or do you mean how MS-NBC is the lowest rated news network or how Microsoft operating systems aren’t on any phones or how the Wii + DS have outsold the Xbox by a 7 to 1 ratio or how no consumer applications use .NET?
The Zune experience has been the typical Microsoft new product release result for years and the XBox 360 was only salvaged by the popularity of Halo 3.
Firefox has been struggling very hard for many years to gain ground. Firefox and its plugins have give or take 2,348 features that IE will probably never have, and STILL IE is the dominant browser.
ICQ was awesome. I still miss some of its features and its stability. I only use MSN because EVERYONE I knew migrated en masse to MSN shortly after the MSN Messenger was included in the Windows OS. I was literally left talking to myself, I had no choice. MSN Messenger was really horrible then, everyone embraced it just because it was included in the Windows OS. The other messengers you mention are nowhere near as popular, except for AIM in the U.S. Twitter has just arrived.
Microsoft dominated the office suite market rightfully? That is debatable. I still run occasionally into grieving Word Perfect widows who won’t miss a chance to trash MS Office and extol the many virtues of WP, that Microsoft killed. Maybe those widows have a point. I wouldn’t know, I never used WP. I used Lotus a little and I thought it was OK.
Microsoft didn’t create HD-DVD, they just supported it.
There are in fact many phones running Windows. They are not very popular, but they are many.
I concede that the Xbox really didn’t do well.
> Firefox has been struggling very hard for many
> years to gain ground.
A browser is a browser, ya know.
As long as it works and doesn’t install viruses on your computer … and IE7/8 don’t do that.
Microsoft is a company past it’s prime propelled by inertia.
Windows is great; Office is great.
But they don’t hire people to do great things and break new ground nowadays.
And you get what you hire and what they hire are cult followers.
And from the beginning of time to the end, it’s the people who think outside the box that are successful.
A search engine that goes “bing”?
Wonder what the Crosbys think of this.
J/P=?
way brighter than your average american.. even in seattle
Regarding browsers, one of the mozilla guys just put up a post with some good charts about market share. http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/06/historical_view.html
Without the Mozilla project there very well might not be an ie7 or 8. Until Firefox began to become a threat, internet explorer was basically dead. Let’s also remember that in the booming mobile browser market Safari and Opera are dominant. Mobile IE is horrible.
Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steven Ballmer said the world’s largest software company would move some employees offshore if Congress enacts President Barack Obama’s plans to impose higher taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign profits.
“It makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” Ballmer said in an interview. “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.”
MS isn’t really much of a friend to the US worker anyway. They already rank number 5 on the list of companies with employees here under H-1B Visas http://businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2009/tc20090223_946195.htm and they’ve also already opened a campus in Vancouver so they can hire more non-North American workers than they can in the USA. http://infoworld.com/t/business/microsoft-vancouver-responds-immigration-woes-068
all hoopla aside..
i find it amusing that there is a slightly dissipated chemtrail in the pic, to the left of the beam, which nobody seems to notice. (and possible remnant to the right)
-s
The people at the top are past their prime and need to be replaced but they control the company besides who would you replace them with?
@#20
You can’t. Such is the life cycle of a corporation.
Steve Ballmer is all ego and talk, but they will continue to rake in billions in profits for the foreseeable future.
But they also will have few new successes and I believe they are viewed by some companies, like Google and Apple, as an ineffective and docile cow.
Apple has really developed a strong developer community around the iPhone; I expect them to leverage that. Google will keep trying to make an online version of Word/Excel to displace Office.
Both (plus others) will try to make the browser more application-centric to eliminate the advantage of Windows as an operating system.