The Weekly Round-Up: 05.06.09

Bada Bing!

Some more on Microsoft's latest attempt to catch up with Google in the search engine race - Bing. Or, rather, as The Round-Up likes to think of it - Bing!

You can now play with Bing to your heart's content as the site (in beta, of course) is now live.

In fact, some people could play with nothing else as a result of a curious little bug in a certain browser. The company is looking into an issue in which users of Internet Explorer 6 are forced into having Bing as their default search engine.

"We are aware of the issue with Bing on machines running IE6 and are investigating a solution," Microsoft said in a statement, not mentioning whether or not the solution was actually called 'Google'.

You may recall the Round-Up discussed Bing last week, and in particular the reasoning behind the brand name: Bing being the noise made at "the moment of discovery and decision making".

Given another week's thought, the Round-Up has come up with some more 'bing' noises.

For example, it's the sound you hear when a lift door opens and you find you've been deposited in the gloomy underground car-park and not the penthouse as you'd hoped. And it's the sound a microwave makes to announce it has just finished cooking your lonely man meal for one.

It's also, according to Wikipedia; a Chinese flatbread; a variety of cherry; a Unix program to measure network throughput between two hosts; and (The Round-Up's personal favourite) a British agricultural dialect term for area where feed - especially hay - is stored before being shaken out into livestock's rack or trough.

If you use Google to search for Bing the first three results are Microsoft's Bing, then Bing Crosby, and then the Wikipedia entry for Bada Bing! "a fictional go-go bar from the HBO drama television series The Sopranos". The Round-Up isn't quite sure what to make of this but at least the newest Bing on the block is in good company.

Unsurprisingly the name has split the tech community in twain, with most people thinking it's a stupid name for a search engine (completely unlike, say, 'Google') and the Round-Up thinking it's actually rather charming.

Bing also has a certain linguistic resonance in China, with the Chinese characters 'Bi' and 'Ing' which, when combined, mean 'very certain to respond' and 'very certain to answer'. Lovely, language is such a serendipitous thing, sometimes.

Of course, there is one other potential inspiration - TV show Friends' character Chandler Bing.

Having conferred with some of the (exclusively female) Friends fans at Silicon Towers, they report that Chandler is best described as "a sarcastic, Thanksgiving-hating, Baywatch-watching, Janice-loving woman-repeller."

Quite how you can use that as the inspiration for a search engine is beyond even the Round-Up's grasp.

In a brief respite from Microsoft-related news this week, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey displayed impressive faith in his product when he said he's looking forward to the day when the world stops talking so much about the company.

He sees the microblogging service as being on the road to being part of the standard way of life, just one of the many ways to communicate. (And if you are a Twitter fan, follow @siliconlatest for all the latest from Silicon Towers - which this week has strangely included a number of tweets about cake.)

"I think Twitter [will be] a success for us when people stop talking about it, when we stop doing these panels," said Dorsey, speaking as he was on a panel at the Future of Media gig in New York.

But Dorsey insisted he isn't tired of people asking him what Twitter's business model is.

"I like that question because it speaks to how Twitter came to be," said Dorsey who has clearly missed his true calling in life as a Labour politician. "We're not going to put something on top of it that doesn't fit."

He predicted that one day people will use it as "a utility, use it like electricity".

The Round-Up isn't sure it's quite got to that point yet, although there are a few 'millennial' (that is, lazy) types in the office who would probably consider Twitter to be on a par in terms of importance with electricity. Although without electricity you don't have Twitter, unless the next plan is to run it on air…

And finally this week - Microsoft has clearly moved heaven and earth to get Windows 7 ready for market and full credit to it, and this week the company announced that the operating system will be unleashed in October.

Despite the rush to market, the quality of the code is "absolutely stellar" according to an HP executive.

And with such glowing reviews, silicon.com's CIO Jury must be pretty excited about deploying '7' in 2010, eh?

"For heaven's sake, you must be joking!"

Not The Round-Up's words - the words of one of the CIOs who won't be deploying Windows 7 for at least 18 months, according to the CIO Jury this week.

"2010 is too soon," said another, who added: "We would, however, be looking to skip Vista."

Just one member of the CIO Jury said they are planning to move to Windows 7 and even then, only if the appropriate drivers to support the organisation's systems are in place. "Other than that we'll stay put," he said.

Microsoft bosses must be eyeing those piles of Windows Vista and thinking - lightning couldn't strike twice, could it?

Elsewhere on silicon.com this week:

Q: Could it really have been 10 years since the birth of Napster?
A: Yes, it has:

There's a new iPhone due next week. Or maybe not. But probably. Get the lowdown on the Apple developer conference.

There's also a new 'iPhone killer' in town: the Palm Pre. Or perhaps iPhone botherer is more appropriate? The truth is but a mouse-click away.

And as always check out the ever popular caption competition.