Sorry, obvious, but I had to go there.
Putting that aside... in the middle of all the noise about Microsoft's Bing announcement, there's an interesting question - can you invent a brand in a lab and expect it to go native?
From the NY Times coverage:
Bing, the name Microsoft gave to the new search service it unveiled Thursday, is its answer to Google — a noun that once meant little but has become part of the language as a verb that is a synonym for executing a Web search...
And if Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too.
One big difference - Microsoft and its branding and marketing crew are trying to "verb" Bing. Google was turned into a verb by... well, by the people.
Google’s name is a play on the word googol, which is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The company has said the name speaks to its ambitious mission to organize all the world’s information.
In other words, Google named itself. Users verbed it - the term "to Google" is a marketplace invention, not the company's.
Which is why it works.
Collaboration works. Top-down doesn't. Open source works. The broadcast model doesn't. Things go viral because they strike a nerve and people pick them up and run with them - not because the chief marketing officer and his gang lock themselves in a conference room and come out with something viral.
It's messy and it's unpredictable and it's intensely uncomfortable for corporate friends, who seem to think that loss of control is a kind of death. But in a post-broadcast world, it's the only way to go.
Question - will people Bing?
Answer - no.
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