╠ Bing It! ╣

When thinking about how to describe Bing I think the best description is that Bing is the younger brother of someone who turned crazy and went on a massive killing spree. Everyone knows he's there and will look at him, but nobody wants to play with him. Thus he becomes and outsider and all the other kids start to make fun of him.

The reason I say this is that I was recently at a Windows 7 training presented by Dell and Bing came up. Now just to set the scene, any Microsoft rep or employee using google is meant to receive a death glare. During setup I noticed the rep open google and then suddenly switch over, realizing his folly. Further more during the demonstration when showing off Windows 7 features, Google was shown as a frequently visited page. It showed Bing as weak, but to make up for it the rep answered all difficult questions with 'Bing it'. It almost seemed like an insult, but it's a good shutdown. Google it has too many syllables, Bing it sounds almost insulting.

Bing's placement in the industry itself makes it even more of a joke. Straight after this demonstration there was a Mac rep who used the same comeback. Whilst Mac itself is smart enough to not take on google for a search engine, 'Bing it' is still more of an insult than an actual proposition that it worked, despite the fact they were promoting a competitors product.

What I find as an interesting point is that will this catch on as a meme. Following on that, if it does how will Microsoft react?

Any further questions? Bing it!

╠ This is for real ╣

After going through some personal phone strife and discovering a lust for the iPhone I heard about Google's mobile that it has created to combat it. Figuring I should get in the know as a seller of such items I went searching quickly and I stopped by the main site.

Now what got me first off was the music that played as it loaded up. My first thought was that I really recognized the song and therefore thought they must have had a massive budget for this to be a song I know because not a lot of my non mainstream likes are all that popular.

To my surprise as the song lifted up I realized it was Motion City Soundtrack which is actually my favourite band. The interesting thing though is that nobody I know really knows them unless I introduce them to it so for me at least it appears to be an obscure band, yet here it is advertising this product.

Much to my surprise they also made a feature appearance in the amazon store part where you can actually choose to play their music to test out what the store is like. The amazing thing is that I know without this music looking at the entire thing I would be like 'The iPhone can do that plus some' which is quite true to be honest however simply using my favourite band so unexpectedly puts me in a positive light. If they were competing against anyone other than apple I may have just been won over.

So basically what I'm trying to point out is how much value we can put on factors that aren't even features of the original product. Whatever band the advertising uses is neglible to the phone features...yet this can increase values if used on the right users. So either there is incredible value in marketing or humans are all stupid. I know which one I'd rather believe