Bing

The audacity and greed of multi-million dollar corporations never ceases to amaze me.

Microsoft recently launched Bing - an attempt to regain control of the search engine marketplace from Google. Don't they realize that this simply isn't going to work? The web doesn't work like that.

Take Jaiku and Twitter, or Vimeo and YouTube. You can't compete with an already established behemoth. You can offer a better quality service (which Vimeo did, but Bing doesn't), but the major force in that area will simply adapt and include whatever new service you provide. Hence YouTube's rapid introduction of HD.

Bing touts itself as an alternative to Google. But 'Google' has entered the English Dictionaries as a verb! Bing is not going to achieve that. For a start, it looks too corporate (it is, after all, a Microsoft enterprise). It has that corporate/Microsoft mix of bad design and over use of blue. Plus, it has a dominant picture of a stingray. Why?

I can imagine the idea is to suggest that you are about to delve into the unknown waters, to reveal the mysteries of the internet's deepest chasms.

Well, sorry, it's a search engine. And Google does the job well enough, while at the same time integrating a zillion other services. I'm no proponent of global domination for Google (which sometimes seems to be their aim), but really - do we need another search engine? Even one with a picture of a stingray?