Technology A History of Microsoft’s Biggest Failures

Microsoft is nothing if not persistent. At times they’re very Johnny-come-lately with their efforts, but you can never say they don’t try. Kinda like Fat Joe. Take their search engine, for example. What started as MSN Search, part of their destination portal MSN.com, was succeeded by the underwhelming Live Search to compete with the ubiquitous search behemoth, and ruler of everything digital, Google. And now they’ve announced their plans to replace that with an entirely new search platform called Bing.

Set to launch on June 3rd, Microsoft is hoping that Bing—which is supposed to bring to mind the sound of a bell ringing to indicate a search is done (we don’t have a multi-million dollar R&D department, but wouldn’t that be “ding”?)—will become synonymous with the verb “to search”, the way “to google” is now. We won’t rule anything out, but they have a hard road ahead of them. At least it’s not the worst idea they’ve had. Take a look back at some of Microsoft’s most famous misses…