I don’t get what their commercials are supposed to be telling us. They’re confusing, annoying, and vaguely terrifying. They seem to indicate that Bing.com is somehow the cure for adult-onset Tourette’s Syndrome. Either that or it guards against getting the fast-forward button on your DVR stuck.
I really, really can’t stand these commercials. Is the product so amazing that it excuses this? I can’t bring myself to use it and find out, as that seems like it might be encouraging them to continue doing what they’re doing.
It means that someone with the technical know-how, marketing savvy, and effectively endless financial resources has elected to challenge Google in the marketplace.
Say what you want about Microsoft…the bastards know how to market and to leverage their natural near-monopoly to their best advantage.
If they’re truly committed to knocking off Google, or even claiming a significant market share it should be one hell of a fight.
I’m usually not a big fan of Microsoft advertisements, but this ad is better than most of their ads. I even like the part:
Tickets------I have two tickets to paradise, pack your bags, we’ll leave tonight.
I actually thought that part was clever. It doesn’t make me want to use bing.com though. (Everytime I hear “Bing”, an image of Matthew Perry pops into my head.)
Maybe I’ll wind up on the wrong side of history on this, but MS doesn’t (IMHO) really know much of anything about marketing, just playing the advantages of a near-monopoly. The current ad campaign for bing is “confusing, annoying, and vaguely terrifying.” My bet is it winds up being a $200 million or so misstep - but that kind of money is pocket change to Gates. I’m still waiting for MS Word to be a stable word processor.
It’s the principle. If an OP wants to direct people’s attention to something, the responsibility is his to provide a link, not ours to go searching the whole god damn internet to figure out what he’s talking about.
I’m reading a book called What Your Childhood Memories Say About You. The book mentions significant childhood memories reported by various famous folks. From the book:
“Computer whiz and entrepreneur Bill Gates, now the richest man in the world, remembers negotiating a written contract with his sister for five dollars, giving him unlimted access to her baseball mitt.”
I assume the OP is talking about televisions ads, and therefore would find it difficult to provide a link that s/he knew was legal.
However, it turns out the links on YouTube are actually sponsored by Microsoft and are perfectly legal. So I present the following link to the bing channel on Youtube:
Oh, and I personally found the ads perfectly understandable (they are making fun of how Google doesn’t understand context, and makes you look through way too many results) and found them funny. I’m sure they’d get old after a while, though.
Except Microsoft (and Yahoo as well for that matter) has been challenging Google for years to no avail. Their latest attempt, Bing, is nothing more than a revamped version of their MSN Search that has bombed against Google three times already.
A new name and a new interface (which I must admit, looks purty) likely won’t change anything.
They have no monopoly on the web. Google owns that. Or in the high-end server space. Linux and various hardware makers own that. Or in the mainframe world. Linux and IBM own that together. In fact, one of the main selling points of IBM mainframes is that they can use virtual machine technology IBM developed in the 1960s to run thousands of Linux instances on one box. Hell, they don’t even have a monopoly in the handheld market, where Symbian and Linux both make very good showings, but they’re doing better there than anyplace else I’ve mentioned so far.
Microsoft owns the desktop and the low-end server space. They’ve flailed around and wasted money everywhere else.
I still use google for most everything but images. Bing lets me display a seemingly unlimited number of images. Google only does 18 at a time. That’s one advantage.