Microsoft Bang? It Almost Happened…
How close did Microsoft come to a major naming mistake with its most recent search engine? Pretty close, according to a CNET interview with Microsoft chief marketing strategist David Webster. According to Webster, Bing was not the first choice for a name for the company’s new search engine but something very close: Microsoft Bang.
Webster said that the company wanted something that was short and difficult to misspell, and Bang certainly fit the bill.
“It’s there, it’s an exclamation point,” he said. “It’s the opposite of a question mark.”
However, he quickly released that using “Banged” as a verb — in the way that someone might say that they “Googled” something — didn’t quite work.
“‘Oh, I banged it’ is very different than ‘I binged it’,” he said.
So instead, Microsoft wound up going with Bing, which Webster said worked out well because it represented “the sound of found.” But we were still very close to millions of people saying that they “banged” Obama on the computer.

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