What Just Happened? Thursday Was Supposed To Be Bing Day.

Everyone knew today was the day that Microsoft was going to launch their new search engine. Everyone's been talking about it for months, and the press and marketing efforts were carefully tailored to maximize the impact. Thursday, May 28, 2009 was supposed to be Microsoft Bing Day. A little after 8 am this morning Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer himself took the stage at the exclusive All Things Digital conference near San Diego, California and announced to a few hundred elite executives that Microsoft would soon be releasing its new search engine , and that it would be called Bing . One problem right off the bat: the Bing.com site wasn't live. And since press didn't know the name until Ballmer said it, it took a while for the news to spread. Another problem: A team of Google engineers based in Sydney was simultaneously announcing a stealth project 4+ years in the making called Wave . And it wasn't being announced to a select few top business executives. Instead, the team that created it was showing it to 4,000 developers at the Google IO conference in San Francisco, California.