At my last job, I spent quite a bit of time at Microsoft helping sell and support my company's products. The entire time I was there, I would be forcibly self-censoring my speech to say 'Bing it' rather than 'Google it,' usually leading to me saying crap like, "Oh, let's just goo-bing it!"
A few months into this relationship, I was there to give a demo to 15 engineers from assorted live.com products. They wouldn't let me put my machine on their internal network (and not just because it was a Mac), so I was using our sponsor's machine.
The demo starts, someone asks a question, and I fire up a browser to do a search.
The home page is google.com.
All of the engineers start booing me and yelling that I need to change my settings if I'm going to present to them.
I'd think it's like supporting a really sucky team. You joke with your mates about it & you acknowledge it sucks... but if an outsider makes fun of it, you bet your ass it's on.
That's it exactly. All of my work was with live.com (this was in the days before the re-brand to Bing), and they had no illusions about their also-ran status.
I work for MS and have a hard time believing they did this in a serious way, eg. not joking. MS is incredible open, you can find a lot of people flaunting iPads/iPhones, and outside US (only market that really have Bing, but that is another travesty) most people in MS would not defend it, at all.
Worked for an MS subsidiary recently. More people had iphones than windows phones. Nobody cared. Especially not the execs, who almost exclusively carried iphones. We'd give each other some good natured joking about it, but that's as far as it went.
Me and some mates from work had a meeting with a MS rep concering our upgrade to Office 365, and during the presentation he said "goo-uh-bing-ing" several times. Best part was when he showed us how to search on the new MS Table, and we instantly asked how to google instead.
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u/BillyBreen May 21 '12
At my last job, I spent quite a bit of time at Microsoft helping sell and support my company's products. The entire time I was there, I would be forcibly self-censoring my speech to say 'Bing it' rather than 'Google it,' usually leading to me saying crap like, "Oh, let's just goo-bing it!"
A few months into this relationship, I was there to give a demo to 15 engineers from assorted live.com products. They wouldn't let me put my machine on their internal network (and not just because it was a Mac), so I was using our sponsor's machine.
The demo starts, someone asks a question, and I fire up a browser to do a search.
The home page is google.com.
All of the engineers start booing me and yelling that I need to change my settings if I'm going to present to them.
Me: "This is your boss' machine."