Microsoft is striking terror into the hearts of prescriptive grammarians everywhere by suggesting that millions of people could start using the word Bing (the recently unveiled latest-and-greatest search engine from Microsoft) as a verb in everyday speech.
And if Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.” Plus, he said, “it works globally, and doesn’t have negative, unusual connotations.”
One of the oft-cited reasons for Google's success, other than the fact that it offered a decent ground floor product at a time when the world was full of search engine suckery, is that it had a name which was susceptible to being immortalized as a household verb. To Google is to search the web, and to search the web is to Google.
Microsoft desperately wants this for Bing.
And I'm sure they thoroughly focus-grouped and psychology-tested and committee-reviewed the name ad infinitem/absurdum. At this level, the billions of dollars level, you don't draw names out of a hat. So the name went through the review and acceptance process and the experts pulled out their pocket protectors and proclaimed that YES, Bing is a GOOD NAME!
The only problem is, the experts were wrong.
While I won't go so far as to say that Bing is a stupid-ass name for a search engine, I will say that as a label for a mass-market search product, Bing sucks like a bag of three-day-old cheese puffs. And by the way: I like Microsoft. I've been using Microsoft technologies my entire adult life. That doesn't make the choice of "Bing" as a cultural moniker any less daft.
Allow me to explain.
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